A subjective comparison of Germany and the United States

I grew up in Germany, lived there for 26 years, then moved to the
United States in 1992. First I was a graduate student and now I work
as a college teacher.

There are many stereotypes in Germany about life in the United
States. Here I will try to compare these stereotypes to the reality in
the US as I perceive it. In this comparison, I will also portrait the
situation in Germany so that Americans might learn something about my
country and Germans have something to criticize.

Of course, this comparison is necessarily subjective - take it as
just another data point.

I am constantly generalizing here; I'm talking about "the
Americans" and about "the Germans" and I'm aware of the fact that,
strictly speaking, these generalizations are wrong; I'm trying to
capture a hypothetical average. And not even that: just the average of
my personal acquaintances mixed with some information gathered from
news media (mainly The New York Times and Süddeutsche
Zeitung, the best newspapers in their respective countries in my view). The first observation is that, in most instances, the US
show a much larger variation than Germany does, so that talking about
the "average" is more dangerous when referring to the US than when
referring to Germany.

Since I started this page several years ago, I repeatedly noticed
that the differences between America and Germany are getting smaller,
a result of Germany moving in America's direction.

There are many differences between the two countries in their approach
to democracy. Most importantly, the US uses the winner-takes-all or majority systems
throughout, meaning that voters get to decide between several
candidates and the candidate with the most votes (or with more than 50% of the votes, depending on the election) wins. Germany uses a mixture of proportional and majority systems in
order to ensure that the proportion of parliamentary seats a party
receives is exactly the same as the proportion of voters favoring that
party (if that proportion is bigger than 5%) while also allowing for
local representation.

The German system gives more power to the parties, since they
decide which candidates to place on the list from which the
parliamentarians will later be drawn. Parties finance the election
campaigns; the candidates themselves do not need to raise substantial
amounts of money. In return, there is a very high party loyalty in the
German parliament. Parliamentarians vote their conscience only on
rare, very important questions; most of the time, they vote the party
line. Parties are financed by the taxpayers according to the
proportion of votes they received, by donations from big business, and
by membership dues.

By contrast, Congress persons in the US are much more independent:
they raise campaign money on their own (or use their own money) and
the party cannot even decide who will be their candidate in a
particular race: this is decided in so-called primaries, races between
the various candidates in which every voter who declares themselves a
supporter of the party gets to vote. Once in Congress, the legislators
can vote their conscience on virtually every question.

American politicians are almost constantly raising money for their
next campaign. Since they are free to change their voting pattern on
almost any topic, moneyed interests have much more political
influence than in Germany.

The majority system in the U.S. basically ensures a two-party system; it is exceedingly rare that a third-party candidate manages to win a seat, and it never takes long before the seat goes back to the two parties. By contrast, in Germany there are usually about five viable parties that send delegates to the parliaments (and many more smaller ones that can't beat the 5-percent hurdle and are therefore not represented in parliament).

A little-known and blatantly unjust feature of the US
system is "redistricting", also called "gerrymandering". The country is divided into congressional
districts, one for each member of the House of Representatives. The person
who wins the most votes in a district gets the corresponding seat in
the House. Every 10 years a census is carried out, and
then the state governments go to work and redraw the congressional
districts, purportedly to make them all the same size. The real reason
is of course to keep the other party out of Congress: the census provides enough information to know where supporters of the other party
live, and the new district boundaries are drawn so as to segregate all of
them in as few districts as possible. This same game takes place every ten
years, and it seems to outrage no one but me.

It is often believed that the position of President in the US is an
veryy powerful one; this is wrong. Essentially all he can do is
govern by changing administrative rules and veto or sign laws written
by Congress, where the majority is often hostile to the
president. Presidential vetoes can even be overridden by a 2/3-supermajority
in both houses. By contrast, the Chancellor in Germany is elected by
the parliament, the Bundestag, which means that a majority is behind
him and most every law he wants to enact will pass, because of the
above mentioned party discipline. Most laws, the ones not affecting
the German states, do not have to be approved
by the second chamber, the Bundesrat. (The precise rules
about which laws have to be approved by the Bundesrat are
quite obscure, and nobody seems to know them.)

The American parties are located to the right of their German
counterparts. Former President Clinton for instance, a Democrat,
would have to be placed at the right wing of the German conservative
party CDU. Some people at the right end of the American Republican
party are so extreme that they would probably be under surveillance in
Germany. There is no social democratic party to speak of in the US; it
is the biggest and oldest party in Germany, and indeed all parties in
Germany are social democratic to some extent.

Even though US politics are located to the right of German
politics, there is a very real sense in which Germany is more
conservative. New technologies and new ways of doing things are
embraced much more enthusiastically in the US. Even conservatives will
often propose quite radical policy changes, such as throwing out the
whole income tax system and replacing it with a national sales tax.
On a whim, some states will introduce gay marriage and others will put
a prohibition against it into the state constitution. Things appear to
move much slower in Germany.

It is not very well known in Germany that most US states have
systems of direct democracy, where citizens can bring up ballot
measures if they raise enough signatures. There are no restrictions on
the contents of these measures: tax reductions, criminal laws, recalls
of unpopular politicians and changes of (state) constitutions are all
fair game. Local prosecutors, sheriffs, and judges are also often
directly elected by the citizenry. In Germany, these are all
appointed, not elected.

Despite all of this, large segments of American society ignore the
political process altogether. Even the big presidential elections see
only about 55% of the eligible voters participating; other elections have
much smaller participation. In Germany, the numbers for federal
elections are around 80%.

I can see three possible reasons for the low voter participation in
the US: votes always take place on regular working days making it
difficult to participate (many businesses grant time off for voting,
but they are not required to), the majority system locks out
supporters of smaller parties, and the system of voter registration
(which requires every voter who moved since the last election to fill
out a form several weeks before the vote) makes it unnecessarily
difficult to vote.

The term "freedom" is ubiquitous in the political and public debate of
the US; it is indeed a very important, if ill-defined, concept for
ordinary Americans. The quotation "Whoever is willing to give up
essential freedoms in order to gain some temporary security deserves
neither" is repeated over and over again; I'm sure that there is at
least one Usenet article circulating at any given time which contains
this sentence.

By contrast, Germans like their security quite a bit and are
uncomfortable with the dichotomy Freedom vs. Security. They want
both. They like to be able to plan ahead for long periods of time.
In fact, when told that in the US one can be fired when getting
severely ill (or for no reason at all -- so-called "at will"
employees), at which point the health insurance coverage is also lost,
puzzled Germans ask "But how can people live like that?" The
exasperation only increases when they learn that in the U.S. you get
unemployment benefits typically only for 26 weeks, after which you get
nothing. (In Germany you get generous benefits for
one year, then basic support forever.) It is even
more astounding to Germans, including me, that given this dire
situation, US citizens are notorious for not saving any money, even
living on credit instead. (Almost all Americans carry several credit
cards; I never understood why anyone would bother to carry more than
one until a fellow graduate student told me that she treats credit
cards as a kind of unemployment insurance.) Even in the presence of
the huge German welfare system which tries to make everyone feel as
secure as possible, people routinely save money, just to be on the
safe side. Personally, I found it very strange to learn that many
Americans, even those with a good income, live on a "month-to-month"
basis, always waiting for the next paycheck to arrive in order to be
able to pay the bills. If they do save, then they usually use the
money to speculate (they call it "invest") in the stock market, which
is again much too insecure for the average German. On a similar note,
Germans don't understand why people keep living in areas which
regularly see earthquakes or hurricanes; natural disasters that kill
people are very rare in Germany. Many of this may be explained by a
generally much higher level of optimism and risk tolerance in America.

The following interchange took place on Usenet between a Dutch person and
an American; it beautifully sums up the differing approaches towards
the concept of freedom:
- "A welfare system increases individual
freedom, because it lets people experiment without the threat of
catastrophic failure."
- "You are not really free if you are not
free to fail."

It is rather surprising however, that given this German emphasis on
security, I cannot find a clear overall plus in freedom in the
US. Sure enough, political freedoms and freedom of speech are
stronger; racist Nazi propaganda for example is illegal in Germany
while it is legal in the US. These prohibitions enjoy wide support in
Germany, while the public in the US normally takes the view "I
disagree with what you say, but I would fight for your right to say
it." Most Germans are not able to take this noble position, probably
because they fear the power of effective propaganda given the
historical experiences. Publishing on the Internet is also less
restricted in the US; in Germany, every commercial site needs to state
the responsible person's true name, and pornographic materials have
to be protected from access by children. [Exception: people in the
U.S. have been
sent to prison for possessing "obscene" drawings or writings about minors having
sex; in Germany this is not illegal.] Google search results are
government-censored in three countries: China, France, and Germany.

Everyday freedom of speech may very well be lower in the US
however: it is severely restricted by the fact that one can be
privately sued by anyone at any time for virtually anything, and being
sued as a private individual is almost equivalent to bankruptcy, no
matter whether the case is won or lost. (Unlike in Germany, the loser
of a lawsuit in the US does not normally have to pay the winner's
legal costs.) People who have spoken up against projects of certain
corporations during town meetings have been sued by those same
corporations, for the very act of speaking up (known as "SLAPP"
lawsuits). Expressing a negative opinion about an American company's
products on a website often results in a threatening letter from a
lawyer. People have been fired for political bumper stickers on their
private cars. When Wikileaks dared to publish secret US diplomatic cables, credit card companies and Paypal promptly cut them off any possible access to donation money. The excellent news broadcaster Al Jazeera is not available on cable TV in most areas. The right to freedom of speech also does not apply to the
homeless: the US Supreme Court has ruled that local laws that
prohibit asking people for money are constitutional. The
same Supreme Court ruled that corporations that give money to
political campaigns are covered by the freedom-of-speech clause and cannot be
prevented from doing so.

In addition, the fact that one can legally be fired without any
reason severely limits freedom of speech at the workplace. Typically,
people are fired at a moment's notice and have to go home
immediately. (Sure enough, given Germans' love for security, Germans
can be fired only given a valid reason and normally only with several
months notice; there is a whole branch of the juridical system, the
Arbeitsgerichte, that deals with deciding which reasons are to be
considered "valid".) If a member of one's family is chronically ill,
the freedom to switch employment is severely limited in the US,
because the new employer's health policy is legally allowed to reject the
applicant. (Nevertheless, Americans switch jobs much
more often than Germans.)

I said above that Germans value security more than Americans do.
There's one big caveat: the paranoid extent of US military spending.
The US spends more on its military than all other countries combined. What
are they afraid of? By now I believe that the rich have engineered an ingenious way
to channel taxpayers' money into the pockets of stock holders of the military-industrial
complex (which was famously decried by President and ex-General Eisenhower).

According to the Patriot Act, the FBI could get access to people's
library borrowing, bookstore purchasing and internet activity records, without requiring a court order.
Librarians and employees who received such an order for information had to comply and were not allowed to talk about it
to anyone. They were not allowed to openly protest, to write a
letter to the editor, or to talk to their spouse about it. The practice, after having been used hundreds of
thousands of times, was finally ruled unconstitutional in 2008. Another anti-terrorism law signed by Obama in 2012 allows the indefinite detention without trial of any person suspected of terrorism related activities.

It is an almost bizarre contradiction that US citizens are not
granted the right to freely travel wherever they want. Cuba, a popular
vacation spot for Europeans and Canadians, is off-limits to
Americans. (Technically, they are allowed to travel to Cuba, but as a result of the economic sanctions they may not spend any money there.) This is especially ironic since one major complaint
against communist countries has traditionally been their refusal to
allow their citizenry to travel freely. I would expect that, were the
German government to restrict the right to travel, major protests
would ensue.

The fact that local communities, states and the federal government
can enact concurrent criminal laws in the US together with often extremely
draconian punishments (combined with sporadic enforcement) also tend
to limit personal freedoms. (In Germany, only the federal government
enacts criminal laws.)

Sports betting, online gambling, prostitution, anal sex, and bestiality are not illegal in Germany but
are illegal in many US states (prohibitions against anal sex were
struck down by the Supreme Court in 2003 however).

Online gambling is illegal in both countries. In Germany it is trivial to engage in online gambling on a foreign website and there are no consequences; in the U.S. it is next to impossible because banks and credit card companies are not allowed to deal with gambling businesses abroad. Germany has rules intended to prevent children from viewing online porn; the U.S. does not (struck down by the Supreme Court). The German rules are completely toothless however and porn is easily available to anyone.

In Germany, all
murderers can be and often are paroled after 15 years in prison
(except for terrorists and the psychologically abnormal), while in the
US murderers are lucky if they can get away with a life sentence without
the possibility of parole (a sentence considered to be violating human
dignity and therefore unconstitutional by the German high court, the
Verfassungsgericht). In the US, children as young as 13 are
often tried as adults for murder and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole in adult
facilities, and 16 year old murderers were sentenced to death (this latter
practice was finally stopped by the Supreme Court in 2005). In
Germany, children under 14 cannot be punished at all, and juveniles
under 18 cannot be sentenced as adults. People under 21 can be treated
as juveniles if the court finds them to be immature.

Several large US cities have enacted curfew rules,
prohibiting teenagers from being on the streets at night if not
accompanied by an adult. Many schools completely forbid any physical
contact or show of affection among students.
These are more examples of infringements on
freedoms which I think would not be tolerated in Germany. In general,
teenagers seem to live much freer lives in Germany than in the US. For
example, it is common for 15 or 16 year old Germans to travel on vacation
to foreign countries with a couple of friends; in the US, it
is rare to see anybody traveling under the age of 18 -- even though 16
year olds are already allowed to drive there, while in Germany the
driving age is 18. It is much easier for German teenagers to drink and
smoke, but other drugs are more readily available in the states. Many
US high schools subject students who participate in extracurricular
activities to random drug test, which also involve tests for alcohol
and tobacco. Their freedom of expression is also limited: often they
cannot criticize school officials or wear offensive or suggestive
clothing. Some high schools forbid their students to hug or even touch
other students. More than twenty states still allow the spanking of
students in school if the parents don't object. Young German
teenagers often spend their weekend nights dancing in discos, while
virtually all comparable clubs in the states are off limits most of
the time to people under the age of 21, because they serve alcohol.
German adolescents over the age of 14 in Hamburg and Berlin may freely
choose where to live (even on the streets if they want); in the
US you are subject to your parents' will up to age 18.

Many government agencies and private employers in the US require their employees
to submit to periodic drug tests, something that does not exist in Germany. (Some jobs in Germany require a one-time drug test as a condition of employment.)

Germany has several heroine ambulances, where junkies (selected according to strict criteria) can inject heroine paid for by the health system. This would be unthinkable in the moralist U.S., where addiction is still largely seen as a personal moral failure.

The degree of economic freedom is higher in the US, mainly because
of the lower level of regulation. In the US, if you have an idea for a
new business, you have to convince a specialized high-risk investment
fund ("venture capitalists") to invest in your enterprise in return
for a share of the business and the profits; in Germany, you have to
convince a bank to provide an unsecured loan, which is much harder.

In the US, you cannot leave your children at home alone if they are
under 12 (varies by state). No such rules exist in Germany.

It is difficult for American retirees to move abroad, since their health insurance system (Medicare) does not reimburse for services provided outside of the country; German retirees do not face such a restriction.

On the
other hand, several regulations in Germany limit personal everyday
freedoms:

you cannot shop or open your shop at night or on weekends; (the
Sunday prohibition is justified with vague Christian rules and with
the supposed
need to keep a day for the family -- brothels are of course open for business on Sundays and holidays)

freight trucks cannot be driven on Sundays or on holidays, not even on Saturdays in
the summer

men have to do at least one year of mandatory military or social service (this was ended in 2011)

your current address has to be registered with the authorities
at all times, even if you are a German living outside of Germany (while Americans are often outraged by this requirement, every American
with a driver's license, and that means everyone, has to register a
current address with authorities; furthermore, personal driver's license information is sold to private businesses, something out of the
question in Germany)

police can and often do ask for your name and address,
especially if you look foreign

artificial insemination is not allowed for single or lesbian women; anonymous sperm donation is not allowed; surrogate motherhood is not allowed. (All of this is trivially and legally circumvented by going abroad and getting the procedures there.)

everybody must separate their garbage into five piles: glas, paper, packaging, compostable, remaining. Sometimes the garbage police checks that you do it properly!

you must take a large number of classes and obtain a license in order to be allowed to fish
or hunt

minors are not allowed in tanning studios

you may not create noise by cutting grass on Sundays

you cannot wear a mask when participating in a demonstration
(the Vermummungsverbot; police want
to be able to identify you on their video tapes; the prohibition is however widely ignored)

if you die, half of your money goes to your nearest relatives whether
you like it or not; you cannot write a will to override it.

All these must sound pretty incredible to the average American I'm sure.

I see one amusing parallel though: both countries hold dear one "freedom"
which virtually no one else in the world recognizes as one: the right to drive
as fast as possible on the Autobahn in Germany and the right to keep and bear firearms in the US.
Both these "freedoms" survive because there are very effective and vocal lobby
groups behind them, even though a slight majority of the general population in
both countries probably oppose them.

Maybe it should be more benignly called "patriotism"; in any event,
it is ubiquitous in the US: flags, the anthem, "pledge of allegiance"
every morning in every grade school, politicians regularly (and apparently seriously) praising
"the greatest nation on earth" etc. This is nauseating to the average
German, but it is also rather difficult to understand given the
widespread hatred for the government and its institutions in the
US. Apparently, the nation is seen to be a completely separate entity
from the nation's institutions. Atrocities committed by the army in
the various wars, crimes committed all over the world by the CIA, and
the huge social problems of the country are openly discussed and part
of the public consciousness, but all of this does not seem to have
much of an impact on the average American's love for their nation. When asked
directly, they usually explain that they love the principles set forth
in the Declaration of Independence and in the constitution, most of
all the commitment to freedom. The economic system of free
entrepreneurship is also often an object of adoration.

The situation in Germany, of course, is radically different. To
love Germany is to love its history, its culture, its political and
economical system, the government's institutions, the whole
enchilada. Obviously, Germany's history cannot be loved, and so it used to be
a pretty safe bet that someone wearing a shirt with a German flag on
it is either a soldier or a foreigner or a neo-nazi. At best, it is
considered to be in bad taste to claim that one is proud to be a
German. (This has however changed somewhat with the 2006 soccer World Cup in Germany, when all of a sudden German flags were visible everywhere.)

On the other hand, the jobless youth in big German cities and in the eastern part of
the country often still present an aggressive nationalistic
attitude, to the extent of harassing and beating (and in some cases even killing)
foreigners with the wrong skin color. This kind of violence related to nationalism is almost unheard
of in the US (except for the neo-nazi crazies in Idaho).

Anti-Americanism is quite fashionable in Germany's educated classes: "they don't travel abroad and don't care about what's going on in the
world, they still don't understand why the world hates them, they are religious bigots,
they believe they are always right and live in the best country on earth, etc."
While all of this may be partially true, it conveniently ignores the
quite noble and enlightened treatment that Japan and West Germany received
after the Second World War, and the fact that the US were the driving
force behind the creation of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights (even though nowadays they don't always pay their UN dues).

It is well known that the US is the most heavily technologized
society; if you count TVs, phones, microwave ovens, cars or
personal computers per person, you'll find that the numbers are far
higher than in Germany, or in most every other country for that
matter. Clearly, they are also world leaders in many technologies,
such as military applications, space exploration, biotech, software
and computer chips.

Americans generally embrace new technologies enthusiastically; it's
cool just because it's new. By contrast, Germans are somewhat more
reluctant and don't try out new stuff without given a good reason
to do so. Sometimes new technology is even made fun of: in the early
years, if a German
saw someone with a cellular phone, they would often assume that the person
felt a need to appear important. If a cellular phone or beeper goes off in a
cinema, concert or restaurant, Germans could get pretty angry. (All this has changed in the last
couple of years however; now everybody has a cell phone. But the
same mechanism is still in effect, for instance with respect to
Bluetooth headsets.) While
every kitchen, office and cafeteria in the US is equipped with a
microwave oven, people in Germany are still debating whether
microwaved foods are good for you and whether microwaves may have
detrimental effects on people with pacemakers. Already in the 1990s almost everyone in the
US had a computer at home; many Germans didn't see the need until much more recently. New (and
not so new) technologies are usually more expensive in Germany
than in the US, average income in Germany is lower, and Germans tend
to stick to their money more.

Some of this may be attributed to the generally higher level of
optimism in America. If you present a new idea, people will usually
respond with "Sounds great, let's try it!", while the typical German reply is "This
won't work because..."

This is not the full story however. I am constantly amazed by the poor
quality and backwardness of many technologies routinely employed in the US.
Sometimes I think that while Germans tend to tolerate outrageous prices without
complaint, Americans tolerate substandard quality. Here are some examples, I
keep discovering more every day:

Cellular phones in the US have operated for a very long time using an
ancient analog protocol, while pretty much all other countries in the world
adopted digital standards several years earlier. To get complete nationwide
coverage, it is still necessary to use analog in the US, and it's trivial to
listen in on these cellular conversations since they are not scrambled in any
way (there is a whole underground scene of eavesdroppers who exchange tapes of
the juiciest conversations they were able to capture), and it's also easy to
place cellular calls on someone else's bill.

The banking system is archaic. It appears as if banks are not
electronically connected at all (even though they are). It is not possible to
instruct your bank to pay your rent every month directly into the landlord's
account (the usual method in Germany). Every month, you have to write out a
check, send it physically to your landlord, who carries it physically to his
bank, which sends it physically back to your bank in order to get the money.
Banks tell you to keep your account number secret, but it is openly printed on
every check, along with your name and address. Some banks now offer "bill
paying services"; this only means that *they* will mail the check to your
landlord instead. Another new system, heralded as a huge achievement, is
"Direct Deposit" or "Automatic Payment". It allows one to make regular payments
such as salary, insurance or utility payments directly without checks. It does
not work between private accounts and it takes about one month to set up. (In
Germany, it takes no time to set up a plan like that; you instruct your bank
and then it works.)
Many US banks now offer "Internet banking" and claim to
be on the technological forefront. All you can do with these services is move
money from your checking account into a savings or investment account, check
your balance and find out which checks have cleared. Almost all
these site use a completely insecure static user/password login scheme;
virtually all internet banks in Europe use one-time passwords or
cryptographic challenge-response systems.
Merchants in the US
accept checks, which of course can be easily abused; German merchants only
accept secured checks.
You will actually see Americans write out checks at
super market checkout counters, and many people set aside an afternoon every
month for "balancing their checkbook" and "paying the bills", two activities
that nobody has even heard of in Germany.
In Germany, checks are not used
to pay bills. You simply instruct your bank to transfer the money into the
payee's account on a regular basis, or give permission to the payee to suck
the money out of your account.
US ATM cards work in German ATM machines
while US ATM machines could not accept German cards until a few years ago. However:
for a while the US ATM system was much more secure than the German one since the PIN was checked online with the
issuing bank; German ATM cards used to encode the PIN on the card with a globally
valid key so that offline operation of ATMs were possible. Today Germany's system
is much more secure, since all ATM cards contain a chip; it is not possible to simply
skim the magnetic strip information and PIN in order to create a duplicate card (unless
you intend to use this duplicate card outside of Germany).

Digital ISDN telephone lines have been available to every German household
for many years. In the US, service started much later, some local telephone
companies still don't offer them, and it's generally poorly supported where
available. Far from being a well-defined standard, ISDN in North America
consists of a zoo of slightly incompatible protocol variations. The analog
phone system still uses tone dialing which for a long time made it possible to
dial for free from every public phone with a $2 phone dialer. Plans for such
dialers were readily available on the Internet.

Online services and network computers: "Bildschirmtext" in Germany and
"Minitel" in France have been accessible by everyone since the eighties.
Both use dial-up telephone connections to browse material on central servers
and allow individuals to publish material on these servers. Bildschirmtext
displays the pages on the TV (optionally on a PC) while Minitel uses a
proprietary little terminal with keyboard, something that would be called
"network computer" these days. Bildschirmtext was never a big success because
of the high connection fees and the start up costs for the device; Minitel was
a winner because the terminals were given away for free to everyone. Services
of comparable quality and breadth have come into existence in the US much later.

Videotext, a free text based information system (news, weather, stock
prices, sport results, TV schedules) broadcast along with the TV signal, is
common in Europe and doesn't exist in the US.

Telephone lines, transformer boxes and electricity lines in US cities are still very often
overhead, which is cheap, ugly, dangerous and makes them vulnerable to storms. Here in
Minneapolis, there's a power outage every couple of months. In Germany, almost
everything is under the ground now and power outages are very rare.

The U.S. telephone number system is idiotic: all area codes are three digits long, while all phone numbers are 7 digits long. So obviously, large cities need several area codes. All these area codes count as local calls however, and local calls are dialed differently from long-distance calls. So you need to know at all times which area codes belong to your local area; when moving around in a city, you have to be aware of the area code you're currently in. And all this information keeps changing over time: when a city grows, they simply add new area codes. In Germany, every city has a single area code. Large cities have short area codes, small cities have long area codes. In small cities, the phone numbers are short, in large cities they're long. Solves all problems.

If you order cable TV in the US, you often get a strange "set top box"
that comes with its own remote control and has to be installed between cable
outlet and TV. Some of these systems even make it impossible to watch one
channel and record another one at the same time. In Germany, you just hook
up your TV/VCR to the outlet.

Many shower heads are mounted at a fixed height and cannot be
adjusted, even in hotel rooms. I don't think I have ever seen that in Germany.

Cars. Enough said.

Many extension cords still come without a third hole for
grounding in the US. When you plug things into electrical outlets,
you'll often observe cute little sparks. That never happens in Germany.

Trains. There is a single daily train connecting San Francisco and Los
Angeles; there are about 17 daily connections between Hamburg and Munich
(roughly the same distance). Almost all rail lines in Germany are electrified; in the US almost all trains are still pulled by diesel engines. There is a dense network of high speed lines in Germany; the US has only a single high speed line (and even that one is pretty slow).

Washing machines. The average German housewife commands a washing machine
that far surpasses the top-of-the-line model in US laundry shops. The common
opening-at-the-top US model which is really not much more than a rotating
cylinder represents the technological achievement of the German sixties. (To
be fair: American dryers are better, bigger and stronger than German
ones.)

Many American stoves arrange the controls in a brain-dead way
behind the hotplates, so that one has to reach over the
boiling foods. In Germany, the controls are at the front where
they belong.

The quality of the plastic bags you get in super markets is incredibly
poor, so much so that they often give you a double plastic bag with a paper
bag inside.

Many houses in the US, even here in Minneapolis where temperatures can reach
negative 40 degrees in winter, still have windows with wooden frames that are
opened and closed simply by sliding up and down, providing minimal
insulation. Germans know these windows only from old American movies. The
majority of new American homes are built with a wooden frame and little
insulation in a couple of weeks, often without basements (even in tornado areas). German homes are made from brick or concrete blocks, have a
basement and very good insulation.

Sidewalks are very sloppily constructed in the US. They are often made
from huge square concrete plates, and these move up and down over time to form lakes
when it rains, often break, look ugly etc.

The US is the last country in the world which still clings to the archaic
Imperial system of units (inches, yards, miles, gallons, pounds). Most
Americans don't know how many inches there are in a yard, how many yards in a
mile, how many ounces in a gallon, how many pounds in a ton etc. (They are completely arbitrary numbers.) NASA lost a $750 million
Mars explorer spacecraft in 1999 because they forgot to convert between
Imperial and metric units.

Some examples of areas where I think
everyday technology is ahead in the US:

High speed Internet connections, in the form of ADSL and cable modem
lines, arrived about 15 months earlier in the US than in Germany. The huge
Internet acceptance advantage that the US enjoyed over Germany was due to one
thing alone: flat rate pricing for telephone and Internet connections; a 24
hour 56Kbps connection in the US cost $20 a month, a 24 hour 400Kbps cable or ADSL
connection cost $50, with the latter mostly available in urban areas
only. (These internet price differences between the two countries have largely vanished in the last
couple of years, in fact flat rate DSL is now cheaper in Germany.)

Air conditioning is rare in Germany. Most Germans frown upon
the idea as an unnecessary waste of energy.

Vending machines in the U.S. generally accept coins and bills and give exact change, some also accept credit cards;
vending machines in Germany (which are much rarer than in the US)
often only take coins and don't give change (though I
hear this has changed recently).

Fire protection technology is generally much better in the
U.S. than in Germany. German apartment buildings often have
just a single staircase and no fire ladders. All doors of public buildings in the US can be opened from the inside without a key; in Germany you will often find locked doors. Fire detectors,
ubiquitous and required by law in the U.S., are rare in Germany. As a result, every couple of
months a large fire will kill several people in Germany. Nobody does anything about it.

In Germany, people are afraid of garbage plugging up the drain of the kitchen sink and clean it out religiously; in the US you happily wash everything down, since every drain has an electric garbage disposal built in.

It's a common stereotype that American TV is unbelievably bad. And for
the most part, it is. You don't get any international news, instead
you see hyped up national and local news, invariably stressing violent
or freak or feel-good incidents; politics is always presented in a
black and white, emotional, and incredibly simplifying manner. Then
you have UFOs and "Unsolved Mysteries", and of course a fair amount of
daytime talk shows with transgender prostitutes who are recovering from
plastic surgery and are now sleeping with their sons, or
whatever. This whole disaster is thankfully interrupted by screaming
commercials every couple of minutes. I can't stomach it for longer
than half an hour.

In Germany, the biggest TV stations are non-profit "Anstalten öffentlichen
Rechts" which are
independent in the sense that politicians cannot directly influence
their decisions, and the top managers are appointed by councils that
represent the major groups in society: political parties, unions,
churches, business etc. Laws prescribe their internal organization and
their purpose. They are financed from a monthly fee that every owner
of a radio, TV set or computer has to pay and from advertising
money. Advertising on these channels is restricted to certain times of the day and never
interrupts movies or news shows. News coverage is usually very broad,
internationally oriented and well-balanced with few freak coverage
(then again, I believe that many more freak incidents happen in the US
than in Germany, for some reason. Have you ever seen a living room
being washed away by the rain or 50 houses burning down in Germany?
Happens all the time here.)

Then there are also private TV stations in Germany, mostly on cable. They
definitely move in the direction of US TV, not quite reaching it yet though.
Much of their programming consists of dubbed US shows. (Almost all foreign
shows and films are dubbed in Germany, while in the US dubbing of foreign films is
very rare.)

Again, there's another side to the story, which is not well-known
outside of the US, maybe not even inside. It is American public TV and
radio. Financed mostly by donations and partly by the government (few
ads), it provides exceptionally high quality programming, much better
than anything I've seen on German public TV. For example, I watched an 8
hour documentary about the war against the native Americans,
stretching out over four days, and a similar one about the civil
rights movement. (Documentaries in German TV are usually 60, at most
90 minutes long.) The news coverage on US public TV and national public
radio approaches the quality of German news, except for international
coverage. Science coverage is clearly superior in US public media. I
personally enjoy the public media in the US more than the ones in
Germany, mostly because of the in-depth coverage of a vast variety of
topics.

There are several strange things to be said about US bureaucracies:
they are extremely user-friendly, amazingly inefficient, and
universally hated.

When filling out your tax form, you can always call a toll-free
telephone number and friendly people will help you or send you
easy-to-understand instructions. The tax forms are very easy to fill
out, and at the end you know exactly how much taxes you owe. You can
even file your whole taxes over the phone. Compare that to complicated
Byzantine tax forms in Germany which are much longer than those in the
US. The instructions for the German forms use nearly incomprehensible legalese. Once you have filled out
everything, you send it in, someone checks it all and computes your
actual tax load which you only learn much later. On the side: by
German standards, taxes in the US, at least for medium incomes and
above, are laughably low, which makes the constant American
complaining about high taxes seem rather funny to me. (Two caveats: stock
market gains are taxed in the US and are not taxed in Germany; US
citizens living abroad have to file annual tax returns about their
worldwide income while Germans only report their German income.)

Other bureaucracies are also generally friendlier in the US than in
Germany. German bureaucrats tend to see their customers as a nuisance
and treat them accordingly, while US bureaucracies work more like
customer serving businesses. This could however also simply be a
consequence of the generally higher level of friendliness in the US
which I'll talk more about in the Violence and Aggression section.

German bureaucracies never bend the rules and have opening hours
that all but exclude working people.

Given my good old German bureaucratic mind-set, the boundless
ineffectiveness of US bureaucracies bothers me a lot. For example, the
US is not able to enforce child payments of divorced fathers. As a
father, you just move away, preferably to a different state, and
there's a very good chance that you'll never have to pay. The mother
would have to hire private investigators and lawyers in order to track
you down and make you pay, but of course she doesn't have the money
for that. Since the bureaucracy is of no help, there actually exist
private companies who promise to make the deadbeat father pay, for a
heavy percentage. In Germany, child payments are simply taken out of
the father's paycheck, end of story. If there are problems collecting,
then the collecting bureaucracy loses money, not the mother, because
she receives the money from that agency in either case.

Another example is the fact that the US has no effective way of
forcing someone to pay an outstanding bill or to make a credit
payment. In fact, I remember seeing a sign at the student loan office
at my university which said "No defaulting allowed". This strikes
Germans as very funny: the word `defaulting' does not even have a
translation, because the concept is virtually non-existent in Germany;
it is simply impossible to default - if you don't pay, you will be
reminded a couple of times and then someone from the court will show up
and take away your belongings. If you don't own enough, they'll put a
hold on part of your future earnings. By contrast, in the US there's a
whole industry of private "collection agencies" which don't have any
executive power and can't do much more than harass debtors without
end by calling them at home and at work. Even the payment of traffic tickets or other legal penalties is
not enforced: In Santa Barbara, the city government takes out a full
page ad in the local newspaper every couple of months and lists everyone by
name who has failed to pay their ticket. Nothing else happens to them,
unless they are stopped for another traffic violation. On the other hand you have this whole culture of private "bounty hunters" who can come in your house, make a citizen’s arrest, and turn you over to the police for a reward. Amazing.

A more bothering instance of US inefficiency is the apparent
inability to ensure full immunization of children. The immunization
level in the US is now lower than that in some developing countries.

And one last example: in Germany, it is impossible to have a car
with a valid license plate and not carry car insurance. If you apply
for a license plate, you have to present proof of insurance; if you
drop your insurance, the insurance company forwards your name to the appropriate agency, which will invalidate your license
plate. Non-valid license plates are easy to spot from far away. This
simple system ensures that everyone who drives carries car
insurance. The US bureaucracies are apparently not able to create a
similar system. Accidents with uninsured drivers are a major problem
here. It goes so far that insurance companies sell special insurance
policies covering the case that you are victim of an accident and the
guilty party does not carry insurance and cannot pay.

One would assume that anti-communism is much more prevalent in the US
than in Germany. After all, the whole German model of a social
market economy is heavily influenced by Marxist ideas. It is
essentially an attempt to avoid the dire consequences of capitalism
that Marx predicted.

The high cost associated with the extensive social system is often
cited as a reason for the relative stagnancy and high unemployment
rate in German society and as an argument for the US free market
model. There is some truth to that; however, the tremendous costs of
the American "social system" are often overlooked: the money spent on
housing a gigantic prison population consisting of jobless, hopeless
or mentally ill inmates. The system cannot cope with all the inmates
anymore and some states have even started to hire private companies to run
prisons.

The US defined itself over a long time as Marxism's big
enemy; in everyday political (Usenet) discussions, it is still common
to be accused of Marxism if one favors proposals such as tax increases
or public health insurance. This accusation is very effective, because
no defense is possible. The term "social democrat" does not exist in
the US public debate, so everything slightly critical of limitless
capitalism is defined as socialism, and this term in turn is used
synonymously with communism and Marxism.

It is interesting to note that in Germany only people critical of
capitalism use the term "capitalism", while in the US only people
critical of socialism use the term "socialism".

Then in the fifties there was Senator McCarthy who, together with his Congress
committee and J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, saw communists everywhere and came up with
elaborate blacklists and other means to get rid of them. At that time,
being accused of communism could amount to a personal catastrophe.

It is not very well known however that Germany saw a much more
vigilant communism hunt at about the same time. While in the US only
about a dozen people ever went to prison for being Communists, that
same number runs in the thousands in Germany. The communist party was
forbidden by the German high court, and party members who
continued their activities were arrested and sent to prison.

Clearly, unions are much more powerful in Germany than in the
US. They are huge, and they don't bother to bargain with individual
employers: they talk directly to the employer's associations in the
different fields. For instance, there is a single union representing
everyone working with metal, and if this union decides to call for a
general strike, a substantial part of the German economy stands
still. If they win a regional contract, it will usually be adopted
nationwide and will then apply to all employers in the field
alike. Several large unions have recently merged in order to increase
their power. Few workers in Germany do not have
a union negotiated contract. Only recently have some employers
(mainly in Eastern Germany) tried to leave the employer's associations
in order to avoid being bound by these contracts.

By contrast, American unions in most fields are weak and splintered
(with some notable exceptions: police, construction, airline pilots,
automobile industry, teachers). Often, different unions fight against
each other. It is not uncommons that Americans actively dislike unions, something very rare in Germany. One possible reason is that historically many unions in the US were allied with the mob; another is that they are viewed as a cartel that prevents the free market from establishing the true price of labor. This allows American employers to openly state their goal of
keeping unions out of their business. A statement like that would
create a huge outcry in German public debate, and it would not go
unpunished. US unions are often hostile towards strike breakers and
force all employees of a unionized company to join the union. This is
not the case in Germany: if you don't want to join, you don't; you
will still get the benefits of the negotiated contract. German unions
often see themselves (and are sometimes seen) as working for the
public good, for example when they try to come up with programs
against joblessness; American unions are much more focused on their
member's narrow interests. Here is an appalling example of this: the
union of Californian prison guards actively lobbies for longer prison
sentences. Another instance of this is that American police unions
usually come out on the side of the officer in police-abuse cases,
while the German police union typically sides with the abused party.

The whole bargaining process appears much more civilized in
Germany. When the contract runs out, the parties meet, they can't
agree at first, there's a strike which usually is only symbolical, and
then a new contract is written up. Everybody pretty much agrees that
this is a good process. In the US, individualism is so deeply rooted
in the public mind that many people outright deny the right of workers
to organize and bargain collectively (no one denies the right of
capitalists to organize in huge corporations though...). Labor fights
are often ugly and war-like and go on for a long time: employers hire
replacement workers right away, they try to fire union organizers and
other strikers (which is illegal in the US by the way, as it is in Germany),
strikers try to keep the replacement workers out etc. To a German, it
looks a lot like the Manchester capitalism that seemed to have been
overcome a long time ago.

Management of airlines in the US have figured out that by filing for bankruptcy,
they can get out of their contracts with unionized pilots, flight attendants and
mechanics, and can shed expensive health benefit and pension plans at the same time. All American
airlines have now filed for bankruptcy. There is no public outcry whatsoever.

The management of US corporations is generally seen to be
responsible only to shareholders. In Germany, management is seen to be
responsible to shareholders and employees alike, even though this
seems to be changing slowly in the American direction.

The common stereotype of the diligent hard working German and the laid
back TV watching American is rather wrong. It is my experience that
Americans are generally much more hard working than Germans. For
example, it is not uncommon to meet people who work two 40-hours-a-week jobs,
or who work full time while also taking a full time course load at a
college. Both are completely non-existent in Germany (there are rules
against working too much, intended to protect workers; two full-time
jobs are not allowed). Many Germans work only 35 hours a week, others
37.5, all take long vacations, and I estimate that over the whole
year, the average German with a job works about two thirds the hours
of the average working American.

In the US, it is quite common that people who are not paid by
the hour work much longer than the 40 hours per week that they are
obliged to. Despite the fact that many large and successful
employers liberally lay off workers to increase profits and appease Wall
Street, employees in the US exhibit a rather strange loyalty to their
employers. They often own stock of the very company they work for and
really want "their" company to succeed, almost like a team sport. In
Germany, where it is taboo for a successful company to lay off
workers, many workers are still not very loyal to their employer:
basically, the boss is the enemy who forces you to come to work
every day.

Even in their time off, Americans often volunteer for charities or
at schools, join their children at sports games, or work out at a
gym. In Germany, it seems to be much more common to relax by spending
time in a pub or going for a walk. Americans watch a lot more TV
though while Germans like to join various sports and hobby clubs, so
maybe the time off is a tie.

While Americans definitely work more, they are very much focused on
making money. By contrast, in Germany there is a work ethic where many
people take pride in producing quality, which I think is sometimes
absent in the US. However, I received a message from an American
project manager who has lived in Germany for 9 years and claims that
the German pride in workmanship and the quality of work is decreasing
rapidly.

In everyday life in the US, you often encounter shocking incompetence. This
is a consequence of the fact that most jobs require only minimal training:

A police officer in the US for instance gets about 6 months of training at
a police academy, while the same job in Germany is preceded by a three year
schooling and training period.

Bank employees in the US are often "trained on the job", while in Germany
every bank teller goes through a three year apprenticeship.

Teachers in the US typically finish a four year college degree during
which time they take some teaching classes; then they take a test and get
their teaching license. Teachers at private schools don't have to be
licensed in any way. In Germany, every prospective teacher must study two fields
plus pedagogy for about 5 years at a university, followed by the first state's
exam, after which he or she receives another two years of intensive
theoretical and practical training at a school, writes a thesis and has to
pass the second state's exam.

Anybody in the US can open a car repair shop without any
qualifications whatsoever;
in Germany, you first need a three year apprenticeship to become a car
mechanic, then you need to be employed as car mechanic for three years, then study
many months to pass an exam, the "Meisterprüfung", which is the prerequisite for
being allowed to open your own shop and employ others. The same is true for many other trades, e.g. shoemaker or plumber.

Now, while many jobs require little specific training in the US, it is also true that many jobs have a prerequisite of a college education (4 year bachelor's degree). In Germany, these jobs just require a basic highschool education followed by a three-year apprenticeship. Examples are nurses, bank employees, foreign trade merchants etc.

Customer service is far better in the US in virtually every respect. Some
examples:

Every major business in the U.S. has a toll-free telephone number. In Germany, if you call your cell phone company to complain about a charge, they charge you for the call.

Every product you buy can be returned even if opened, and you get your
money back. In Germany, normally only defective products can be returned, and
most of the time you can't get cash back. (Mail-order purchases may however be returned by law during the first two weeks.)

Store opening hours and telephone line hours are much more consumer
friendly in the US. (Except for restaurants, which often close annoyingly
early in the US.)

Germans acknowledge all these disadvantages, but often argue from the
worker's standpoint and not from the consumer's perspective: "Who
wants to answer phones at 1 a.m. anyway?" or "The salespeople
shouldn't have to work on Sundays." The logic is that most people
spend more time working than consuming, so it makes sense to skew the
rules in favor of workers.

The most conspicuous difference between the two legal systems is the
use of juries in the US. Every defendant has the right to a jury
trial. (They may opt for a trial without jury, but almost no one
does. Interestingly, the situation in Japan is opposite: there no one
chooses a jury trial.) Even civil cases are normally decided by
juries. The appeals process doesn't use any juries though. In Germany,
judges or panels of judges decide all cases. It is not well known in
the US that in medium size cases, these judges are assisted by
two lay people ("Schöffen") whose votes count just as much as those of
the judges. The lay people serve on a series of trials with the same
judge, while in the US a jury serves only for a single trial. The judge in
the US has only procedural power and has no say in the outcome of the
trial (in egregious cases they can overturn the jury's decision,
however). Whereas in Germany the Schöffen consult closely with the
judge and are informed about all relevant legal aspects of a case, in
the US the jury typically receives rather short instructions asking
them to answer a simple yes/no question. Schöffen have a say in
sentencing while juries do not (except in capital punishment cases).

In Germany, both the prosecution and the defense may appeal an
unfavorable outcome; in the US only the defense can appeal. The
Supreme Court in the US appears to be more transparent than the German
counterpart, the Bundesverfassungsgericht. The names,
political affiliations, voting patterns and opinions of the individual
judges, as well as dissenting opinions are common knowledge in the US,
while the same information is generally not reported in German media.

Only about 4 percent of criminal cases reach a jury trial in the US:
most cases are resolved during "plea bargaining" between defense and
prosecution, where the prosecutor threatens with harsh sentences in order
to get the defendant to plead guilty to
a lesser crime. The outcomes of jury
trials are considered to be volatile and are avoided by both parties
if possible. Often, as a condition of these bargains, the defendant
has to give testimony and aid in the conviction of other criminals. In
Germany, there is some resistance against deals of this sort
("Kronzeugenregelung"), and after having been used for several years
in cases of organized crime, they were abandoned. The general feeling
is that punishment should follow culpability and should not depend on
the outcome of "dirty deals": defendants without important information
don't deserve harsher punishment. Americans are typically very
pragmatic: "Why not give him a break if it helps in catching another
bad guy?"

The U.S. legal system is openly partisan and political. Typically,
when a new president is elected and a administration comes in, all 93
U.S. Attorneys are fired and replaced by new ones belonging to the
right party. The U.S. Attorneys are extremely powerful: they decide
who is investigated and prosecuted at the federal level, they are the
ones who oversee the plea bargaining process, and they are the ones
who decide what charges to file and what appeals to pursue. In
Germany, prosecutors have life-time positions not subject to political
appointment.

The American system actively discourages confessions; if a suspect
confesses and pleads guilty, he or she will get the same punishment as if convicted by a
jury (unless there was a plea bargain). In Germany, a confession normally results in a reduced sentence.
There is another difference with respect to confessions: if a U.S.
defendant pleads guilty, there won't be a trial: the confession is taken to be true.
In Germany a confession counts only as one piece of evidence during trial; the
case still has to be proven, because it is known that many confessions are wrong.

The system of criminal laws in the US is much more Byzantine and complicated
than that in Germany. The German criminal code is a little booklet
which can easily be read and understood in one afternoon, while the
criminal section of the U.S. code comprises several thick
volumes. And this is only the federal level; the states and even the
local jurisdictions in the US pile on their own layers of criminal
codes. On top of all that there's "common law" which is a rather
ill defined body of rules that isn't written down anywhere and that is
the result of prior court decisions sometimes going back to England
several hundred years ago. (Common law is mostly used in civil cases
and its importance has been decreasing in recent years.) In Germany,
only the federal government issues a criminal and civil code and there
is no common law layer.

The civil and criminal codes are more transparent in Germany;
however, the rules and regulations that apply to businesses are issued
and enforced by various different bureaucracies and are much more
numerous and a lot harder
to navigate than the American ones.

The US legal system (officially denies but) practices double
jeopardy: you can be tried, sentenced, and punished twice for the same
crime, first by the state and then by the federal system. This is
mostly used in drug cases and is rather rare however. Drug law is
strange in that state laws are usually relatively lenient when it
comes to drug possession, while federal laws are extremely harsh;
people who are caught can only hope and pray that the federal
prosecutor won't be interested in their case. In Germany, possession
of small amounts of drugs for personal use is normally not
prosecuted. In the US, the government may also take away all property
that was used to commit a crime, for example a farm where some
marijuana was grown or a house in which drugs were found. Even if
acquitted or never prosecuted in criminal court, the accused still has
to fight in civil court for the return of their property.

As mentioned earlier, punishment is in general much harsher in the
US than in Germany. But there is one very sinister aspect of the
German system: Sicherheitsverwahrung, a concept going back to the
Nazis. If a criminal has completed their sentence and a judge decides
that they are still a grave danger to society, they can be kept locked
up indefinitely. It is not used very often, however.

In the US, so called crime stopper programs are common: they
provide a toll-free phone number to anonymously accuse anyone of a
crime and they pay a reward if the call results in a
conviction. Germans are generally appalled by this system since it
reminds them of the Nazi (and Stasi) scheme of having everybody spy on everybody
else, and because it encourages false accusations in order to get back
at somebody.

Police in the US commonly use lie detector tests to check the
statements of suspects; the results of these tests are however not
admissible in court unless all sides agree. In Germany, lie detectors
are considered to be unreliable hocus pocus and are not used at all.

Parliamentarians (or Congressmen) in the U.S. are also called "lawmakers", and
that's exactly what they are. The only way to distinguish yourself in
Congress is to make a law and get it passed. One frequently gets the
impression that laws are only introduced in order to make a public
statement and to get news coverage. These laws are often written by
the Congressmen themselves (without much legal knowledge, because
they usually don't have a law degree). The result is an amazing zoo of
laws that don't fit together (and are often struck down by the
courts). I have seen a specific medical procedure being outlawed in
California by putting the ban into the state constitution in
order to make the prohibition more difficult to change. Overall, the
US legal situation is not very aesthetic: no overriding principles,
just a huge collection of random prohibitions. Many regulations that
are handled by German bureaucracies much more flexibly are written
into law in the US because the lawmakers traditionally don't trust the
administration.

In Germany, it is rare that individual parliamentarians introduce a
new law. The common procedure is that larger groups of
parliamentarians (from one party or being interested in one topic)
work together, or that a minister's staff works out a law.

The American system of bail, which forces everyone arrested for a
crime to pay money or go to jail, is considered to be blatantly
partial to the rich by Germans. In Germany, bail is rarely used;
defendants awaiting trial have to stay in prison if and only if they
are considered dangerous or likely to flee.

Generally, police and prosecutors have more power in the US than in
Germany. For instance, police are allowed to and regularly perform
undercover operations in many areas, including posting officers in
adult cinemas or saunas to watch out for "indecent conduct". In New
York City the police have planted unattended bags all over the city;
people who pick up a bag without reporting it are
charged with a felony. Officers
can also act as "agent provocateurs", for instance they can offer to
sell drugs, pose as prostitutes, or pretend to be teens looking for
sex in Internet chat rooms. Undercover policemen are also routinely
used in large political demonstrations. In Germany, undercover
operations can only be used in severe cases of organized crime. Police are also not allowed to deceive a suspect into revealing incriminating evidence. However, in Germany evidence that was obtained illegally may be used in criminal trials (the government has repeatedly bought and used illegally obtained information about tax evaders), while this is not possible in the US.

The U.S. system of civil law allows "class action suits" which don't exist in Germany. A group of people with a similar complaint, typically consumers alleging fraud on behalf of some company, can collectively file a lawsuit. Their lawyers will work on a contingency basis for a percentage of the final settlement (this is also not allowed in Germany). Other affected parties can later join the suit at no cost. Winning a class action suit is a bonanza for the lawyers while the injured parties usually see relatively small amounts.

In general, courts award much higher liability damages in the US than in Germany, easily by a factor of 10. This, combined with lawyers working on a contingency basis, means that corporations must constantly defend against ridiculous lawsuits and will add all sorts of warnings to their product descriptions ("Do not eat iPod Shuffle!").

Germany has extremely strict privacy laws: the supreme court has
acknowledged a right to "informational self-determination" and
everyone storing personal data about others has to obtain consent from
these persons, has to allow them access to their records, and can use
the data only for the purpose they were originally collected for. The
federal government and all states have privacy ombudsmen who take
citizen's complaints and make sure that the privacy laws are enforced
and extended where appropriate. Germans value their privacy highly and
essentially everybody agrees with these laws.

So do I, and it is absolutely frightening to me how privacy rights
are constantly violated in the US. Credit card companies keep
databases about your purchases and sell the information; supermarkets
issue frequent-buyer cards in order to track your preferences; if you
buy a TV set in an electronics store, they ask for your name and
address; the post office sells information about who moved where; the
Internet set-top box WebTV dials up Microsoft every night to upload
information about your web surfing habits; automatic face recognition
cameras are used in sports arenas and casinos; surveillance cameras
are common in public city areas etc. etc.

The US has very strong access-to-information laws. If the
government collected it, and it does not affect vital national
interests, then you can file a request to see it. Emails of the
president, phone bills of the governor, lists of all issued driver's
licenses: everything is fair game. These laws enjoy wide public
support.

Interestingly, neither is privacy a big issue in the US nor is
access to information a topic in Germany. Clearly, the two issues are
opposite ends of a spectrum - you can't have both at the same
time. Maybe this difference between the countries is a symptom of the
fact that Germans tend to distrust big business, while Americans tend
to distrust big government. Quite predictably, the consequence is that
corporations are more powerful and government is less powerful in the
US than in Germany. When Americans need a quick example of government
gone bad, recent German history serves well; when Germans need a quick
example of corporate excesses, American businesses are often used.

In one area, the US approach is far superior to the German (or
European) one. All information and data collected or produced by
any arm of the federal government is released into the public domain,
without any copyright. Be it images from the Hubble space telescope,
sequences from the human genome, satellite images of environmental
degradation, photos of the president or cancer statistics: in America they are all completely
free to the public for any purpose whatsoever, including commercial
purposes.
European governments
are much more protective and usually give out data like these only for
non-profit research purposes under specific licenses, while retaining
full copyright.

Given their privacy obsession, it is surprising that Germans enjoy
much less privacy than Americans when accessing the internet or using
the telephone. Whenever you access the
internet, your name must be registered with the internet access provider
who has to store it along with the assigned IP address for 6 months, to allow for later
law enforcement investigations. Telephone companies have to store time
and location of participants in cell phone conversations,
also for 6 months. In the US there are no such
requirements; you can go to any coffee
shop and get free and completely anonymous wireless internet access;
anonymous cell phones can be bought in any convenience store.

The American system of high school education, where all students
regardless of talent attend the same school for 12 years, has been
tried in Germany as "Gesamtschulen". Conservatives are usually opposed
to this model, calling it egalitarian and socialist. (It appears less
socialist however if one takes into account that US schools are
financed locally and hence poor communities generally have bad
schools; the rich avoid the public school system altogether and send
their kids to excellent private schools.) The traditional German
public school system divides the students at age 10 into three groups.
The pupils in the three groups go on to
different schools, only one of which, the Gymnasium, leads to the
Abitur, which is the sole entrance requirement for universities. It is
possible to switch schools after age 10, but it is difficult and
relatively rare. The division into three groups is supposed to be
based on performance alone, but appallingly often the parents' social
status plays a role. Private schools are almost irrelevant in
Germany.

US pupils get a lot more vacation: 12 weeks during the summer,
plus one week for Christmas and one week of Spring Break. German
pupils get 6 weeks during the summer, 2 weeks in the fall, 2 weeks for
Christmas, and 2 weeks Spring Break. On the other hand, German
school is usually over at 1pm, while US school lasts till 3 or 4 pm.

While
teaching in the US is often considered to be just another "job", teachers in
Germany are highly regarded professionals and are much better
paid. The training required to become a German teacher is quite a bit longer than that for US
public schools.

In the U.S., parents may elect to school their children at home;
this is sometimes done by religious conservatives who don't agree with
evolution or sex education being taught to their kids. In Germany, home
schooling is not allowed (though some US-inspired evangelicals have tried).

The system of early childhood education is much more comprehensive
in the U.S. than in Germany. Kindergartens are not free in Germany,
and there are not enough spots for all kids. By contrast, the
U.S. has a universal and free "Head Start" program targeted at
disadvantaged kids. On the other hand, American women often work until
several days before giving birth, and start to work again a couple of
days later; there is no financial support for parents, except for tax
breaks. In Germany women are not allowed to work from 6 weeks before
until 8 weeks after giving birth and receive their full salary during
this time; after that the mother or father can take one year off,
receiving 66% of their net pay and a job guarantee. Parents also
receive $200 Kindergeld per child and month, until the child
is 18 and often longer.

The German public (including me) generally assumed that the German
school system is far superior to the US one -- until the devastating
results of the PISA 2000 study
came out. It showed that the knowledge and skills of German students
were consistently below the
performance of US students (which typically hovered around the
international average). Since then,
more German parents have begun to send their children to private
schools, which had performed better than public schools in the study.
(Some Germans have criticized the PISA study, claiming that students
were told that the results didn't affect their grades and they were
free to leave once finished with the test.)

When I arrived in the United States, I believed that all
universities there were private, that professors could be fired if
they didn't work hard enough, and that in any case only the rich or
the exceptionally smart could go to college due to the high
tuitions. Wrong on all counts.

Many states maintain public universities supported by taxpayer's
money, and these have very low tuition for residents of the state. In addition,
virtually all universities, public and private, are heavily subsidized
by grants from the federal government. All relevant private universities are
non-profit institutions and scholarships are given
freely. Professors earn tenure after having been employed and shown a
good record for about five years. Their jobs are then virtually
guaranteed just as in the German system. The tenure system exists at
public and at private universities alike. (In Germany, all but one
university are public; professors have tenure from day one.) Surprisingly, public universities and schools
pay significantly higher salaries than private ones.

In general, the German system places much more emphasis on big
examinations while degrees in the US are automatically granted if the
student has passed a sufficient number of classes. This is true both
for the high school diploma, which doesn't involve any exam in the US
and consists of several big written and oral exams in Germany, as well
as for college degrees, which in Germany require passing several oral
exams and producing a thesis.

It turns out that professors in the US are a lot freer than their
German colleagues: for about four months of the year, they can do what
they want, without any obligations of presence whatsoever. While
Germany also has long semester vacations, professors still have to
report to work every day (except for their regular vacation time). On
the other hand, German professors usually have personal secretaries
and post doctorial academic assistants, which most US professors lack. Professors in
Germany are very highly regarded in the public opinion and accordingly
full of themselves.

If you go to a college town in the US, you will see students
studying in libraries, coffee shops, book stores etc. In Germany, it's
rare to find students studying in public.

It is very interesting to compare the accessibility of academia in
the two countries. On the face of it, Germany wins hands
down. Attending a university is cheap (they introduced tuition in
2007; typical tuition is about 5% of a typical tuition in the US) and (except for overrun fields
such as medicine or psychology) prospective students don't have to
apply anywhere: they simply sign up at their school of choice and
start studying, provided they have the Abitur. On top of that, the
German government pays a fellowship to every student without affluent
parents. Only one half of this grant is paid out as a loan and has to
be paid back later.

It is not very well known that a much larger proportion of the
population attends college in the US than in Germany. Almost one half
of all Americans acquire a college degree during their lifetime,
compared to only one third of Germans. (University degrees in Germany
used to be worth more than US college degrees however; an American four-year Bachelor of Science degree is
roughly equivalent in knowledge to a German Vordiplom while a German Diplom, which
took 5-7 years to acquire, roughly corresponded to a Master's degree. In the last couple of years, Germany and most other European countries have switched to the Bachelor/Master system. Much of the
material of German Gymnasiums is taught in the "general education"
part of the first two years of
American colleges.) Many more jobs require a college education in the US than in Germany.
Families in the US start saving money early on in
order to be able to afford the college education of their kids later;
many students work during their college years and most take out
substantial educational loans. In American colleges, you constantly meet people
between the ages of thirty and forty who have decided to go back to college
in order to get a better education and have a chance at a better career; this is exceedingly rare in
Germany. Germans can in principle earn the Abitur later in night
school, but few do. Once you've got your job, you've got your job, and
that's that.

There can be no doubt that the American system is much more
friendly, open and accessible to immigrants with insufficient
preparation.

While the elite universities in the US do give out scholarships to
very talented students from all over the world, there is still an
extremely disproportionate number of rich people's kids at these
schools. It is clear that students of medium talent have no chance to
enter these schools unless their parents are extremely well off.

When looking at higher education in the US (graduate
school and research universities), one notices a very high
proportion of foreigners, to an extent where the system would almost
stop to function if the foreigners were to leave. In Germany, foreign
professors are very rare, probably because of the language barrier and
more restrictive immigration laws, combined with a lower
overall attractiveness of the country to foreigners. Furthermore, the
old fashioned German universities require a "Habilitation" before
someone can teach; this is an additional thesis and exam after the
doctorate that doesn't exist in the US. There are however quite a few foreign students and post-docs in Germany.

Generally speaking, the average American Ph.D. is less capable and
less broadly
educated in their field than the average German
Dr.rer.nat. Specialization occurs earlier in the US, the time is
shorter and many more people of only medium talent pursue a doctorate.
Most Ph.D.'s become college teachers with minimal research tasks; such
teaching jobs are much rarer in Germany.

The US university system is very prestige oriented; whenever you
state your degree, you immediately add the name of the school
where you obtained it. The better universities can afford to maintain
high entry requirements, while schools lower on the list have to take
all students they can get. By contrast, the German university system
is largely homogeneous and degrees are perceived to be equivalent.

It seems to me that while the average American is much more health
conscious than the average German, the average German is actually
healthier.

The first thing every visitor to the US notices is the immense
number of astoundingly obese people. There is a huge obsession with
fat-free foods, to the extent that people happily eat sweet desserts
as long as they are fat-free. Americans seem to be eating constantly:
in the car, at the movie theater, at work, while watching TV; more
often than not, it is fast food or snacks. In many poorer
neighborhoods, the only nearby store is a neighborhood convenience
store which typically sells potato chips, coke, snacks, bread and peanut
butter but little to no vegetables, fruit, milk or other fresh
foods. In Germany, the schedule of three meals a day is still more
strictly followed and groceries are much more common than convenience
stores.

Many Americans take food supplements and vitamin pills daily,
something that Germans sometimes find mildly amusing: "Just eat your
vegetables!" Germans are very picky when it comes to non-natural
ingredients in their foods. Injecting milk cows with synthetic growth
hormones (as is common in the U.S.) would be completely out of the
question there, and Germans deeply dislike and fear all genetically modified foods,
while the average American couldn't care less.

Americans smoke a lot less than Germans and virtually all public
spaces except bars are smoke free. People generally look down on
smokers as losers. (Update: e-cigarettes are much more common in the US than in Germany.)
Americans also exercise more, typically in fitness centers,
which again many Germans find slightly suspect because of the
closeness to body-building, which is generally considered to be
utterly ridiculous.

To be fair: nowhere will you see more drunken people in public than in
Germany.

The US media commonly report that high tech and critical medical
care is more advanced in the US than in any other country, that hospital
equipment is generally more up to date and that new
and experimental treatments are adopted earlier. I used to believe this as well,
but recently I received a message from a surgeon who has worked in Germany and in
the U.S., saying that these differences are, for the most part, non-existent.

The treatment of chronic and mental diseases and rehabilitative
care is much more advanced in Germany. This is also the area where the
lack in health insurance of a large proportion of the US population
has the most severe effects; if you suffered a heart attack, you can
easily get a free triple bypass, even if you are an undocumented Mexican without
health coverage, but American health insurance policies contain only
minimal coverage for mental diseases. There are virtually no treatment
options for uninsured people with chronic diseases or long-term mental health problems
short of Social Security disability benefits.

On the other hand, almost everyone in the US who can afford it has a therapist, often just to get reassurance and general life advice. Many more people in the US are on antidepressants, which doctors will happily prescribe for pretty much any complaint.

The system of health insurance in the U.S. is completely broken;
this is obvious to anyone who looks at it. It persists in
its current form because of
the systemic corruption in US society that I describe elsewhere. Most people get health insurance through
their employer. Employers are not required to offer this benefit;
smaller ones don't. (Exceptions: in Hawaii all employers must provide
coverage, and in Massachusetts everyone must carry health insurance. Obama's health care law requires that after 2014 everyone in the US must carry health insurance and large employers must offer it; those who don't pay small penalties.)
Coverage rarely includes medicines or dental
care. Often it is provided by "HMOs" which means that one is severely
restricted in the choice of doctors, treatments and hospitals. If you
lose your job, you need to start paying the full insurance premium yourself; if
you can't afford that, all coverage is lost at once. Up until 2011, insurers could and did reject people
with pre-existing conditions such as diabetes or asthma. Public
hospitals must treat critical conditions of the uninsured; afterwards they send out inflated bills, resulting in a
huge number of personal medical bankruptcies. The retired are covered by a
single-payer system called Medicare. They can freely choose doctors,
at least among those who accept the rather low Medicare
reimbursements. There is a completely separate system for veterans:
they are treated for free in government-owned hospitals that are not
open to the general public.

To me, the obvious solution to this mess is to scrap the whole
patchwork and extend Medicare
coverage to everybody, paid for by an additional tax on employers and
employees.

In Germany, everybody is covered by health insurance. Employers pay
half of the insurance premium of their employees, which is a fixed percentage of the
salary (so that high earners subsidize the others); the
government pays the full premium for the unemployed. Coverage includes dental care and medicines
(subject to some copayments) and is provided by
Krankenkassen, half-private non-profits whose rates and
reimbursements are very similar. Patients can freely choose Krankenkassen, doctors
and hospitals. Retirees receive the same coverage. The rich and the
self-employed are allowed to leave this system and can purchase private insurance (which
usually pays higher reimbursements and is therefore preferred by
doctors and hospitals). Civil servants (Beamte) are required
to carry private insurance; the government then pays half of their care.

The US is among the few countries in the world where prescription drugs can be advertised directly to consumers. A large portion of TV ads are for prescription drugs. This is not allowed in Germany.

Statistically the US fares worse than
Germany: infant mortality is about 40% higher (mainly because of the
high teenage pregnancy rate and because many poor people with
high-risk pregnancies never receive any prenatal care), life
expectancy is roughly the same while total per capita health care expenditure
is about 60% higher in the US than in Germany.

In several different senses, the degree of mobility is much higher in
the US society than it is in Germany.

First of all, Americans move around a lot more than Germans. It seems that
most people don't stay longer than two or three years at the same place, at
least until they buy a house.

More importantly, Americans change jobs much more often than
Germans. It's not at all unusual to meet someone who had been a
soldier, then after retirement became a teacher, and then moved on to
become a truck driver. Careers like that simply don't exist in
Germany. One reason is probably that virtually every job in Germany
requires at least a three year low paid apprenticeship; nobody wants
to go through that twice if they don't have to. Generally, the German
economy offers a lot fewer low-paid no-training "McJobs" than the
American economy does; this is due to much higher labor costs. No
supermarket could afford to hire someone simply to stuff customer's
plastic bags.

Then there is a lot of mobility between classes. If your parents
are workers, than you are much more likely to become a worker yourself
in Germany than in the US. (One probably has to exclude the American
inner city slums here, which don't allow for much class mobility --
the only realistic perspective for boys seems to be drug dealing and
for girls bearing children.) Of course, mobility is not only upward:
middle-aged engineers who end up as supermarket clerks after being
laid off are not unheard off; sometimes people slide right through
into homelessness after losing their job. Generally speaking, the
classes in Germany are much more static.

In one sense of the word though, Germany shows more mobility:
traveling. Wherever you go in the world, you'll find Germans. They
are obsessed with traveling. Many people take two major vacations per
year. Clearly, this is facilitated by the fact that Germans get about
6 weeks paid vacation per year (which does NOT include the unlimited number of sick days)
plus some 11 (or more if you're in a
Catholic state) paid holidays, compared to an average of 3 weeks plus
6 holidays in the US. There are other obstacles to traveling as well: when
I once asked a graduate student I knew in Santa Barbara why his wife
and his new-born child never came to visit from San Francisco, he told
me that they were afraid to travel because their health plan
would only cover illnesses of the child when treated in San Francisco
clinics.

Only about 50% of the members of the US House of Representatives
have ever left the country. For a German, this is hard to fathom. But
then again, Germany is only about the size of Montana.

When I first arrived in the States, the thing I liked best was the
great diversity in people. Not only the different races, but also the
very varied life styles and outlooks on life. Germans are a lot more
homogeneous: obviously in their race, but also in their clothes,
manners, ideas, values, life styles.

This is only half of the story though. If you walk down a street or
take a bus in a big German city like Frankfurt or Berlin today, you'll hear about as many
languages as if you did the same in London or Paris. It's probably still
true that Germans are more alike than Americans, but there's more than
just Germans in Germany these days!

I find that in several areas, the level of discrimination is lower in
the US than in Germany:

Virtually every public bus in the US is equipped with a lift for wheelchairs; this
is not very common in Germany. It's also next to impossible for the
disabled to take trains in Germany. (On the other hand: the
handicapped can ride all trains
and buses in Germany for free.)

Mentally and physically handicapped children are routinely educated together with normal children in the US;
this is still the exception in Germany.

All public buildings in the US are accessible by wheelchair, required by
law. No such law exists in Germany and many public buildings are not
accessible.

Many more women in the US work in traditionally male jobs such as truck driver,
carpenter, police officer etc. There are also more women to be found in prestigious professions, such as lawyer, scientist or manager. In
Germany, the traditional view that a mother should stay home with
her children is still rather common, and men only rarely marry a
woman who earns more or has more education than them.

Racism in everyday life is less prevalent in the US than in Germany, and
it is discussed more. Americans cannot (and do not) assume that someone who
cannot speak proper English or has brown skin must be a foreigner. In Germany,
slight grammatical errors as well as foreign features are usually cause for
scorn and different treatment. Foreign-looking people are commonly asked to
show their papers by police. While some right-wing politicians ride the
anti-immigrant wave in the US, the general population's view of immigrants is
much more positive than that in Germany, where it is not at all uncommon to
overhear comments like "all they do is steal and take our jobs".

There's a lot of anti-immigrant rhetoric in the U.S., but the
situation of illegal immigrants is actually much better than that in
Germany: undocumented children can go to school without problem
(though not to college), hospital visits are possible without fear
of being arrested, children born in the U.S. are automatically
U.S. citizens, and the wide availability of fake IDs makes life
in general pretty easy. In Germany, undocumented children cannot go
to school, hospitals must report suspected illegal immigrants
(though few do), and children born in Germany to illegal immigrants can never
receive any official papers whatsoever.

Germany hosts one particularly cruel type of racist
discrimination: adoptions of children from poor countries are
extremely complicated and only very rarely allowed by the German
Jugendämter. (Germans sometimes even agree with these
restrictions, fearing the sale of children in poor countries.)
International adoptions are much easier and much more common in the U.S.

In Germany, there is quite open age discrimination in the job
market, to the extent that 45-year-olds are sometimes told that switching
careers, or even only switching jobs, is next to impossible. In the
U.S. this is much rarer, and a 50-year-old going back to college to
become a teacher or doctor is not unheard of.

When you send in a job application in Germany, it is expected that
you attach a photo of yourself. The only point of this appears to be to enable
discrimination against the old and ugly.

There is much more verbal
abuse of homosexuals in the US than in Germany, some of it even from politicians (though
most of this is just rhetoric to pacify the nut cases on the religious right
(whom nobody really takes serious but who unfortunately like to go
out to vote a lot)). In Germany, several prominent politicians have been gay
(e.g. the secretary of state and the mayors of Hamburg and Berlin) and people are quite relaxed about this.
However, the legal situation of homosexuals is quite a bit better in the US. They can now marry
in a number of states, and civil unions offering all
the benefits of marriage
are available in several others. By contrast, the registered partnerships available in Germany
are rather hollow since they leave out all the financial benefits of true marriage. Homosexual
couples can and often do adopt unrelated children in the U.S.; in Germany a
homosexual may only adopt the partner's biological children, and
only if they are in a registered partnership.

Christian nuns teaching in Bavarian public schools are allowed to wear full
habit and crucifix; female Muslim teachers are not allowed to wear
their headscarves. Such blatant and official discrimination based on religious
belief does not exist in the U.S.

However, there are also other issues. There is widespread structural
discrimination against blacks in the US. They often live in poor,
crime ridden neighborhoods with inadequate schools, health care and groceries,
which quite predictably leads to a dramatically lower life
expectancy. The HIV infection rate of blacks is about eleven
times higher than the rate of whites, yet governmental safe-sex
campaigns directed at blacks are nowhere to be seen.

Another victim of cruel discrimination in the US are the mentally
ill, many of whom ended up homeless or in prison when almost all
public mental institutions were closed in the seventies. Decent
long-term therapy for mental diseases is not covered by most insurance.

Protections against cruelty to animals are much stronger in
Germany. In parts of the U.S. they are missing altogether; e.g. cock
fighting is legal in Louisiana. In many states the protections that do
exist do not apply to farm animals or experimental animals.

Success in the US is almost exclusively defined as economic success;
those who have such success try everything to show it. It is cool to
be rich and people look up to the rich, to the extent that someone
whose only credential consists of being a billionaire can almost
become president (Ross Perot).

By contrast, the rich are not particularly well-liked in
Germany. In politics, being extremely rich would certainly be a
disadvantage. In the back of the German's mind there's still the
assumption that someone who owns that much must have exploited others
to get it.

The obvious fact that the rich in the US have much better access to
health care and legal representation than the poor is generally not
seen as an injustice. To Germans, this notion is deeply
offensive. When I discussed the O.J. Simpson case with Americans, I
would usually point out that he got away with murder because he was
rich enough to hire the very best lawyers; many people I spoke to
didn't even notice the implied criticism: they replied "Sure, the rich
can buy better lawyers. They can also buy better cars. That's what
wealth is."

Generally speaking, the average living standard in the US is
considerably higher than in Germany. More people own their home,
houses are bigger, people own more luxury items and have more
disposable income. Two caveats are in order: first, the variation in
the US is a lot larger, and the poor in the US are poorer than the
poor in Germany. Second, as all Germans will hasten to point out,
quality of living is not determined by the number of luxury goods
alone: Germans have a lot more vacation time, better mass transit, and
much fewer worries about paying for health coverage and college.

Everyday small-scale corruption is very rare in both countries. If a
policeman is about to write you a ticket, you better don't try to
offer him some money. You won't get your driver's license any faster
if you slip in a bill with the application, etc.

I read slightly more small-scale corruption stories in the U.S. than in
Germany: policemen keeping confiscated drugs for themselves or
demanding sex from prostitutes, guards smuggling drugs into
prisons, mayors taking kickback money, immigration officers issuing
fake greencards and so on. Americans are horrified and outraged by
these stories: they truly hate corruption from the bottom of their hearts. But
it isn't really a big problem, and maybe the greater number of stories
simply reflects the larger size of the country. German companies are
more inclined to pay bribes in foreign countries than U.S. companies are; this practice has
been made illegal in Germany only relatively recently, because of US pressure.

My real point is different. Large-scale corruption of the legal kind
infects every level of U.S. society. In fact, the USA invented and
perfected the system of effective legal corruption. Here are my
examples:

Politicians receive most of their money from corporations. The
Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that no law may reign into this
corporate influence, since corporations enjoy 'freedom of speech',
i.e. freedom to bribe. These rulings ensure that no law or
policy intended to curb the power of corporations can stand in the long run.
Concrete results of this lobbying: tax loopholes allowing big corporations to evade
paying most of their taxes, the defense industry receiving a steady stream of contracts,
deregulation of the financial industry, weak labor laws, etc.

Government regulators can look forward to well-paid positions on corporate boards
once they leave government; consequently they treat their future employers favorably.

Every publicly traded company has a board of directors, which among other things must approve the CEO's astronomical compensation package. The job consists in attending about five meetings a year and pays several hundred thousand dollars per year. These directors are typically CEOs of other companies, all too happy to sign off on each other's pay raises.

CEOs of major commercial banks serve on the boards of Federal Reserve Banks (the U.S. central bank).

Plea bargaining is the rule in criminal court; the more expensive
your lawyer, the better your deal.

Among the most profitable businesses are ostensibly non-profit hospitals and universities, which don't pay taxes. The profits are paid out to executives, used for expansion, or channelled to other non-profit institutions.

Bond rating agencies are paid by the bond issuers.

Almost all the news media are privately owned and depend on advertising money.

Coverage on TV news programs can be bought; this is how many new products or services are launched.

Employers and banks require in their contracts binding arbitration for all disputes (instead of court trials),
with biased arbitrators whose financial well-being depends on those
very employers and banks.

Drug companies help researchers write medical articles about their drugs and lather
doctors with gifts and trips.

All drug trials must be overseen by institutional review boards to ensure that subjects are treated ethically. Most drug trials nowadays are conducted by private companies which hire private institutional review boards. These boards provide reviews (solely based on the submitted paper work) for a fee; if the review is negative, the company can simply hire another review board.

Every large city desperately wants sports teams; the team owners know this and regularly ask for and receive huge public subsidies for building new sports stadiums.

Policemen regularly and quite openly receive pressure to increase their numbers of arrests and citations for minor violations, while keeping down the numbers of serious crime reports.

In expensive night clubs, rich men pay thousands of dollars to
sit at a table, and promoters get paid for every pretty girl they lure to the
club; the girls are then "introduced" to the rich.

All of this is done completely above board. Money is rarely exchanged
for favors in an explicit manner. But the requested favors are
understood; if you want to keep the money flowing, you know what is
expected of you.

There is a strange parallel between the relationships Canada/US and
the Netherlands/Germany: the smaller brother looks at the bigger one and finds
fault with much of what he sees, he then desperately tries to do
everything better, succeeds remarkably well, but tragically, his
efforts are completely ignored by the big brother and the rest of the
world -- he is simply too small and unimportant.

This is even more tragic in Canada's case since Canada is the
biggest trade partner of the US but is still completely and utterly
ignored in the US public debate; nobody there knows the Prime Minister
or the capital of Canada; Canada simply does not appear in newspapers
or news programs.

Someone wrote to me that the relationship between New Zealand and
Australia may be similar. One should also point out that the Dutch and
German languages are closely related.

Environmentalism is much stronger, if more abstract, in Germany. After
all, there's very little untouched nature left in Germany, especially
when compared to US national parks which harbor a breathtaking variety
of pristine nature. Hiking and camping in nature is very popular in
the US, and so one could argue that Americans are
on average closer to nature than Germans.

The abstract, big German environmental issues, such as the
greenhouse effect, the ozone hole, energy saving, overconsumption, and
garbage reduction are almost non-existent in American public
debate. Every once in a while, an article appears whose author wonders
whether the greenhouse effect really exists (a question that has been
considered settled in Germany since the early 1990s). Energy saving
is a complete non-topic (or at least it was before the recent oil
price explosion), and accordingly, energy is wasted at amazing
levels. The only fear that appears every once in a while is that the
US could become dependent on foreign oil. The concept that fossil
fuels are finite and that we will run out soon is very un-American: of
course science will come up with wonderful fusion technology just in
time. Garbage reduction is almost unheard of. In every supermarket,
your purchases are immediately stuffed into paper or plastic bags
(sure enough, you get to choose which type of bag: it's the land of
the free after all).

In the US, fuel is cheap, cities are spread out, mass transit is
poor, many people commute 50 miles a day to work, large cars are
considered to be cool, most apartments' rent includes heating, and air-conditioning is used almost everywhere
at least part of the year. All this contributes to an immense energy
consumption.

Germany invests heavily in wind and solar energy. Everyone pays a surcharge on the price of electricity, money that is used to subsidize the price paid to producers of alternative energy. Plenty of farmers nowadays make most of their money from their wind turbines. Nuclear energy is being phased out. The majority of people agree with this system.

Environmentalism in the US is often very down-to-earth: getting
industry to clean up a certain toxic waste site, protecting a
particular endangered species, or preventing a particular piece of
land from being developed.

Since about 2005, hybrid cars (especially the Toyota Prius) have been quite popular among the environmental crowd in the US. Even though gasoline costs about twice as much in Germany as in the US, these cars are still very rare there.

On the surface, air pollution standards are much more stringent in the US than in
Germany: catalytic converters in cars had been required 20 years earlier and
diesel engine cars virtually have been regulated out of
existence. After all these years, particle filters are still not required in German diesel cars.
However, air quality in German cities is better than in U.S. cities due to newer cars and actual enforcement of the air standards on the books. American industries often get “grandfathered in” on their air permits. Large German metropolitan areas now require that any vehicle entering the city have a clean air emissions certification sticker on the windshield; those old diesels are not allowed to drive into the cities anymore.

While all German parties have embraced the notion that
environmentalism is not detrimental to economic progress and in fact
can spur technological innovation and provide job and export opportunities, most
American politicians still see environmental regulations as a direct
threat to jobs and to the competitiveness of US businesses.

When it comes to charity, Germans like to support organizations that
attack global problems: Unicef, Greenpeace, Amnesty International,
Doctors without Borders, World Hunger organizations etc. By contrast,
people in the US prefer to give money to entities that are closer to
home: churches, women's shelters, soup kitchens, schools and colleges,
AIDS and cancer research. Overall, Americans donate more money to
charity per capita than Germans do. Americans are also much more
likely to volunteer time for these causes than Germans are. In the US,
it is quite common that people volunteer for charitable organizations
such as homeless shelters or projects that teach disadvantaged kids
how to read. In Germany, volunteerism is normally restricted to
initiatives that aim to educate fellow citizens about problems in far
away countries.

I see two reasons for these different approaches to charity: first,
Americans distrust big organizations and third world governments; they
fear that money they donate to global causes will trickle away in
bureaucracies somewhere. Second, Germans intuitively don't feel much
of a
need to help local organizations or schools: "that's the government's
job, that's what I pay taxes for."

If I had to boil it down to a word or two, I'd say naive
optimism characterizes the American mentality and
deliberate, hesitant pessimism the German one. This
is a crass simplification and does not mean that most or even many of
the people share those characteristics; it just means that, assuming
these mentalities, it is possible to explain many of the differences
between the two countries, such as the much higher crime rate in the
US, the higher need for security and lower degree of mobility in
Germany, the much lower birth rate in Germany, and the higher level of
friendliness in the US. Even the rabbits and the squirrels are more
courageous in the US.

From the outside, the USA looks like a terribly violent and aggressive
country. Virtually all you hear about the US has something to do with
violence: extremely high crime rate, violent movies, death penalty,
right to bear arms, bombing of select third world countries...

Once one enters the country, a couple of items can be added to this
list: the news coverage focuses a lot on violence, the violent horror
movies in the video stores are openly visible to kids (they are not
placed in the adult section together with porn movies as in Germany),
extremely harsh punishing even of non-violent criminals (including the
recently revived chain gangs in some states), and violent TV cartoons
for small kids on Saturday mornings. Generally, Americans have a much
higher tolerance for violence in the media (and a much lower tolerance
for sex) than Germans. To me, this is perplexing, since America's
violence problems seem to be much more severe than Germany's sex
problems :-)

A peculiar type of violence, school kids shooting around in
schools, is not that uncommon in the US and is very interesting mainly
because it seems so puzzling to Americans. Every outside observer
soon concludes that media and video games glorifying violence
together with easy availability of guns and adolescent's common
psychological problems provide a satisfactory explanation for the
phenomenon. Americans cannot reach this conclusion however because the
right to bear arms and the right to free speech are considered
sacrosanct. So all they are left with is "these are bad kids", and you
actually hear people say that.

Somewhat paradoxically, everyday life is a lot less aggressive in
the US than it is in Germany. People are generally more polite and
friendly. Phrases like "please", "thank you", "excuse me" and "you are
welcome" are a lot more common in the US. It happens all the time that
a nice girl that you have never met before smiles at you for no
apparent reason. (In Germany, they do it only if they have a very good
reason, which means that you're in business.) If you wait in line in
an American supermarket, you don't have to constantly watch out for
people who try to cut in in front of you.

Traffic is much more relaxed in the states, very unlike the all-out
war on German streets and highways, with tail gating and
drivers cutting you off. People in the US actually drive slowly and
cautiously, even though virtually everyone can get a driver's license
at age 16 after taking a trivial test. Germany requires months of
expensive training and a difficult test, but people still don't
understand the concept of defensive driving.

The higher friendliness in the US is often noticed by German
travelers, who will typically then add "but people are terribly
superficial". There may be some truth to that, but a lot of it is just
a consequence of faulty translations. Words describing emotional
states are generally used much more liberally in the US than in
Germany and common dictionary translations are often wrong. People
will call you a "friend" if you have had a nice 20 minute conversation with
them; the German "Freund" is only used for someone that you have known
for a long time and are emotionally close to. Similar for words like
"hate", "happy", "excited", "wonderful" or "love".

The American friendliness is fragile however and is mixed with a
strange moralistic streak: if somebody does anything considered
morally wrong, the normal sympathy and empathy is immediately and
utterly withdrawn and replaced by heart-felt condemnation.

Maybe a more descriptive term than "impolite" for the typical
German is "anal-retentive". Germans are extremely punctual.
If you're short a couple of pennies when
paying at a supermarket checkout, they will make you search, with the
line waiting behind you. Little "give a penny/ take a penny" baskets
don't exist there, and the concept goes against everything a German
believes in. Everything has to go by the book, and Germans like to be
right. No doubt, Americans are more relaxed.

It seems that there is a lot of tension and aggression buried in
the average German, maybe as a result of the much higher population
density. The level of friendliness, relaxedness and un-aggressiveness
seems to be higher on the West coast of the states and lowest in the
big "quasi-European" cities of the East.

Germans commonly commit suicide in a particularly vicious
passive-aggressive manner: jumping in front of a train. That doesn't
happen in the US; people are polite and simply shoot themselves.

Even though the overall crime rate is much higher in the US than in
Germany, low-level "nuisance crimes" such as pick-pocketing, car
vandalism and bicycle theft are much rarer. Americans are generally
trusting and it is quite common that they leave their house entrance
doors unlocked during the day, something Germans never do, except in
the countryside. Germans like their front doors to be massive, while
American doors normally can be broken in with modest force.

Like most things, crime is more evenly distributed in Germany than
it is in the US. The higher American crime rate is mainly due to inner
city pockets of gang violence; outside these pockets, life is just as
safe as in Germany.

In Germany, there are violent clashes between opposing soccer fans
and police almost every weekend. This does not happen in the US.

Comparing the political debates in the two countries is rather
illuminating. The speeches of German politicians are generally less
controversial, more inclusive and often hint at compromises. (They are
also more substantial.) By contrast, politicians in the US have no
problem talking about an outright "cultural war" (between the left and
the right) and regularly accuse their opponents of everything from
stupidity to adultery. But when it comes to physical political
violence, Germany is far ahead. If a leading politician gives a speech
in the open, he can expect having foul eggs thrown at him. People will
shout and whistle in order to disrupt the speech. None of that ever
happens in the US. The president can actually give a speech at a
university and everyone will be polite and listen -- a very strange
concept for German students. This is even more astounding if one takes
into account that the difference in viewpoints between the Left and
the Right in Germany is much smaller than that between the Left and
the Right in the US.

Political demonstrations, smaller and rarer in the US than in
Germany, are also a lot less violent. Politically motivated riots,
which happen regularly in Germany, are rare in America. This is
probably because young people tend to be more political in Germany,
and kicking the butt of a policeman is still the easiest way to fight
the system.

The logical next step is then political terrorism, which in Germany
exists both on the left and on the right but is (at least in its
organized form) almost unheard of in the US. It fits the picture that
the terrorism that the US sees either comes from foreign countries or
is the deed of fringe individualists.

In Germany, state and church are closely related, in a manner which
must seem appalling to most Americans who believe in the complete
separation of church and state. The "Konkordat", a contract entered
into by Hitler and the Vatican in 1933 (Hitler offered it to have the
church keep quiet about the Holocaust, and it worked out rather well),
as well as "Kirchenverträge" with the Evangelical Church mandate that
churches get to teach religion in public schools, that the state
collects church dues in the form of "church taxes", and that churches
get access to public universities in order to train their clergy. The
bishops of the two Christian churches are paid directly by the
government, not by the churches. Most
of the German holidays are religious. Public dance on many religious holidays is forbidden.
Church hospitals or kindergardens may fire employees who get an abortion or remarry after a divorce.
Blasphemy, "if capable of
jeopardizing public peace", is a punishable crime. The biggest German party is
called "Christian-Democratic Union".

All this has surprisingly little effect though; the Christian
churches have far less influence on public life in Germany than in the
US and are rapidly losing members. (Catholicism in Bavaria is the last
holdout.) The main reason is that the overall degree of religiosity in
the population is much lower. In the US, many people actually go to church
every Sunday, something mostly reserved for lonely elderly women in
Germany. The proportion of people believing in God is higher in the US
than in any other industrialized country. In Germany, people will
laugh at you if you tell them that you literally believe the fairy
tales of the Bible; only some sort of "abstract religiosity" or
better still "spirituality" is
acceptable in public discourse. A shocking eye-opener for me was when I overheard two young
women, maybe 20 years old, at the next table in a coffee shop in the US, eagerly
discussing the subtleties of a Bible story! In the US, there are many people who believe what the
Bible says word for word, and they are not ashamed to say so. This may
be an instance of a more general fact: Germans are generally more
skeptical and critical than Americans. Some examples:

Many people in the US believe in UFO abductions.

Americans will happily apply a chemical bug spray in the kitchen or fumigate their entire house as long
as it says "safe for humans" on the label.

Americans believe that they have "saved" money if they buy something for
$50 which has a crossed-out label of $100 attached to it.

People send loads of donations to Christian faith healers who stage
the most ridiculous of TV shows.

An entire self-help industry in the US tells people how to organize their love-lives, how to become successful in business, how to beat depression etc.

In the US, after a wedding in a church the priest or pastor signs
the official marriage papers.
In Germany the couple has to go to the Standesamt to make the marriage
official.

In Germany, the Catholic Church is generally considered to be more
conservative than the protestant churches in social and political
issues; the situation in the US is opposite. People on the "religious
right", a large and influential movement populated mostly by white
protestants, are vehemently opposed to abortion (several abortion
doctors have been killed by people on the fringes), believe in the
literal truth of the Bible to the extent of opposing Darwinism (these
people are called "creationists", a word that doesn't even exist in
German nor would it be needed), oppose premarital sex, and call
homosexuality a sinful choice. These same people also enthusiastically
embrace the death penalty, private ownership of guns, military
spending and lower taxes, without even noticing a contradiction to the
Christian message of "Don't judge, live poor, love your enemies".

A number of US states still have laws on the books prohibiting
atheists from holding public office. (These laws are not enforced.)

The bigot Christian influence can be felt throughout American life:
no swearing on radio or TV is allowed (it is rather ironic to hear a
beep whenever someone tried to say "fuck", especially in a country
which prides itself in strong opposition to censorship), no nudity
whatsoever on TV either, and no substantial sex education in the
schools (resulting in the highest teen pregnancy rate of the developed
world). The media discuss the topic of sex only in the context
of crime or disease: there is a huge obsession with child molestation,
rape, sexual harassment, AIDS etc.; Hollywood rarely shows sex in love
movies but almost exclusively in "erotic thrillers", films which
intimately link sex to some crime. Crimes involving sex generally
carry higher penalties than non-sexual crimes. Many states publish name, offense, photo and address of past sex offenders on the internet; these laws do not apply to murderers or other violent criminals. The advertised cure for
AIDS is abstinence; ads favoring condom use cannot be shown on
national broadcast TV and a broad based billboard campaign by the government promoting condom use (as in Germany) is unthinkable. It is also more difficult to
buy condoms in the US; they are not available from vending machines in most public restrooms
as in Germany. Even in swinger clubs, condom use is not consistent in
the US. Public nudity at nudist beaches or in co-ed saunas is extremely rare; even in saunas
Americans are typically not nude. In Germany, every medium-size city has a co-ed sauna where everybody is nude (but the German love for rules always shines through: try to use a cell phone and people will point to the Verboten! sign; refuse to drop your swimsuit and the Bademeister will educate you that this is a "textilfreier Bereich" (textile-free area). In the U.S., women are not allowed to go topless
at public beaches (I believe New York State is an exception, because of a court ruling there). Live sex acts cannot be shown in sex
theaters. Anal or oral sex, even between married adults, were illegal
in several US states until 2003; while these laws were almost never enforced, no
lawmaker would dare to attempt to remove; the Supreme Court
finally invalidated all these laws in 2003 but they remain on the books. Some southern states in
the US even prohibit the sale of vibrators. Topics like legalization
of prostitution are utterly unmentionable.

The word "rape" is used in a much broader sense than the common
German dictionary translation "Vergewaltigung". The latter means
"using physical force to achieve intercourse", while "rape" is
nowadays often used in America in the sense of "an unpleasant sexual
experience that was later regretted by one party".

Still, the matter is not completely black-and-white; the American
Puritanism and prudishness often only covers the surface. While it is legal in the US
to display hard core pornography on Internet web sites open to all, this is not
allowed in Germany. Similarly, sex magazines that can be bought at
regular newsstands are harder in the US than in Germany; in the US,
satellite hard core porn channels can be ordered and this is not
possible in Germany. There is no radio program in Germany as graphic as
Howard Stern. There are certainly more strip clubs in the US
than in Germany (a consequence of the higher taboo surrounding public
nudity). The sexual revolution began in America, America initiated the
mainstreaming of pornography, and today the US porn industry feeds
the whole world and is comparable in size
to Hollywood. Abortion regulations are more liberal in the US than in
Germany. [Contraception is not taken very seriously in the US,
resulting in triple the abortion rate of Germany.] Many of these freedoms come courtesy of the Supreme Court,
which is very powerful and quite liberal on some topics. Indeed,
throughout history, lots of progressive changes in US legislation
can be traced back to Supreme Court decisions; legislatures are often
too scared for bold moves.

It is also my impression that the atmosphere at US colleges is more
sexually charged (clothing, flirting, partying etc.) than that at
German universities. This however could have something to do with the
fact that American students are typically a couple of years younger
than German ones.

In Germany, there's a general ban on working on Sundays and
holidays, with a number of specific exceptions. This ban is supported
by the churches: after all, it's the content of the third (or fourth,
depending on who you ask) of the Ten Commandments. The
Verfassungsgericht upheld the ban, pointing to the important
spiritual content of Sundays. In the US, Sunday work is legal and very
common, and Christians don't make an issue of it. God's
Commandments are seemingly less important if we're talking business.

Another strange contradiction given the strong religious base is
the enthusiastic embrace of exotic reproduction techniques and genetic
modification in the US. Destructive research on human embryos as well as human cloning is
legal in the US (but not funded by the federal government) and illegal
in Germany (German researchers aren't even allowed to perform these
procedures abroad). Rent-a-womb arrangements where a woman carries the
fetus of another couple and sperm banks selling sperm based on the
donor's features also don't exist in Germany.

Maybe one of the most important experiences one makes when living in a
foreign country is to realize the amazing arbitrariness that exists
everywhere when it comes to enforcing laws. Here are some of the
differences I observed:

Alcohol laws. In order to drink alcohol, even beer, you need to be at
least 21 in the US. If you look younger than 30, you actually have to show an
ID card when buying alcohol in a supermarket or when entering a bar. Police
hire teens for undercover alcohol buying and do arrest people for
drinking alcohol in public, or even for walking around with an open container. In many states,
restaurants and bars cannot serve alcohol outside.
In Germany, there is probably a law against youths drinking alcohol, but I
don't even know the legal drinking age. (Actually, you can drink beer with 16
and liquor with 18). It certainly is not enforced and the issue never comes up
in public debate. Drinking in public is perfectly legal; generally alcohol is
much easier available in Germany than in the US.

Jaywalking. In Germany, if a policeman is around, pedestrians won't cross
a red traffic light. If they do, they will surely get a warning or even a
ticket. If there is no policeman around, other pedestrians will sometimes
become agitated about this behavior. Both of these do not happen in the US,
even though jaywalking is illegal just the same. (New York seems to be a notable exception: don't let a policeman see you jaywalking there.)

Car registrations, drivers licenses and car insurance. In the US, just as
in Germany, your car has to be registered, you have to have a driver's
license, and you have to carry car insurance in order to be allowed to drive.
In Germany, driving without a license is considered a major infraction, and
driving without registration or without insurance is virtually unheard of.
People actually get agitated if they see a car without a license plate. In the
US, you often see cars without plates, and no one seems to care much. What's
more, laws that require to carry insurance are not enforced at all, and many
people simply don't do it.

If you ride a bicycle in Germany which does not have proper lights, night
or day, policemen will stop you. In the US, even though there are rules for
bikes to have lights, most bikes don't and no one seems to care. People
actually ride at night without lights.

Illegal immigration: a giant topic in the US political debate of course,
but the existing laws are simply not enforced. Everyone knows that the entire
Californian agriculture industry would break down were it not for illegal
Mexican migrant workers. In everyday life, your visa is never checked; in
eight years, I have never shown mine to anybody except at the airport. Local
police don't care about these things, it's a federal issue, but the federal
government mainly protects the borders. Fake greencards and other papers can
be bought relatively easily, and they are not too expensive. (Many
college kids carry fake identification in order get into bars.) I believe that it
is much harder and more expensive to get a hold on false identification in
Germany. In addition, whenever a German policeman stops you, you have to show
your visa.

Older people dress a lot more conservatively in Germany than in the
US. It's not uncommon to see a seventy-year-old American in shorts,
sneakers, t-shirt and base ball cap; this is unthinkable in Germany.
(Likewise, you will never see a German senior citizen at McDonalds.)

Business people dress identically in the two countries, and younger
people also dress similarly for the most part. The gang style dress
code (gold chains, baggy pants, sneakers, bandannas) is quite common
among male black teenagers in the US; in Germany, nobody dresses like
this and the style is only known from rap videos (apparently this has
changed a bit recently though).

In summer, German women sometimes don't wear a bra, which is much
less common in the US. If they wear a bra, German women usually try to
hide it by wearing loose fitting shirts; American women often wear
tight fitting t-shirts under which the bra is clearly visible.

In Germany, most public spaces, restaurants, and offices used to be full of
smoke. (This changed with anti-smoking laws being passed in 2008.) People habitually throw cigarette butts on the ground.

In German restaurants, asking for free water with your food is
frowned upon and uncommon. There are very few water fountains in
public buildings, something ubiquitous in the U.S.

In Germany, when you have eaten in a restaurant, taking the leftovers with
you is still often frowned upon; they are thrown away. In the US, it is
customary to ask for a box.

US restaurants usually stop serving food at 10pm, some already
at 9pm (except junk food joints). In Germany you can eat till
midnight.

Everybody claims that beer is better in Germany, but it's not
really true. Almost all German restaurants and pubs are in the pocket of some
brewery and may only serve one type of beer; in a US restaurant you
usually get a choice of 10-20 different beers.

In the US, when you enter a restaurant, you have to wait for a waiter to
seat you; generally you cannot freely choose your table. In Germany, you just
sit down wherever you want.

US coffee shops and restaurants often provide free Wifi; this is
much rarer in Germany.

In the US, foods are often served in a way which makes it impossible to
eat them in a civilized manner, for instance tremendously huge hamburgers,
too long French fries, and muffins. As a result, people eat with the
fingers and require an inordinate amount of napkins.

Waiters in US restaurants have a habit of coming to your table while you
are eating or while you are talking and interrupt you with "Is everything
OK?". Sometimes they even try to start a fake conversation.

In Germany, stores usually won't allow to return purchased goods for a refund (except for online stores, which are required to by law); in the US, pretty much anything can be returned for a full refund, without having to give a reason.

Bottles with crown caps in the US can always be opened without a
bottle opener, by simply turning the cap. In Germany, you need a
bottle opener.

In Germany, there are almost no motels, and there are very few cheap
ways to spend a night, especially close to the highways.

In Germany, TV shows start at varying, strange times. In the US, all shows
on all channels always start on the full hour.

The US uses absolutely brain-dead bank notes: all denominations have the
same size, feel and color. (The American Council of the Blind sued the government
over this, and won--nothing changed.) Furthermore, the largest denomination is only $100.

German dog owners almost never collect their dog's feces. In the
US, most cities require this and most dog owners do it.

In German cinemas, you have to endure a much longer barrage of
commercials.

German jelly donuts contain a lot less jelly than American ones.

In the US, apartments or houses for rent or sale are commonly advertised with
a large sign in front of the house. In Germany this isn't
done: you have to find the address from ads in newspapers, on the internet or from
real estate agents, which is annoying.

Most US bookstores have coffee shops and armchairs and are open till
11 pm, also on the weekends. Most German ones discourage browsing,
don't offer coffee and close at 8 pm, and don't open at all on Sundays.

Cheerleaders, high school girls cheering and dancing in short
dresses for the boys' sport teams, actually do exist in the US. I
had always thought they only exist on TV, just like the laughter in the
background of soap operas. But no: girls actually do want to be
cheerleaders. To Germans, the whole setup is ridiculous, sexist, and
degrading.

In the US, prices are always stated without sales tax, so you never know
in advance how much you actually have to pay.

Americans have a strange obsession with the points of the compass.
Frequently inside a building you will find signs like "This elevator is out of
order. Please use the one on the North side of the building." How am I
supposed to know where North is? Why can't they just tell me where the
elevator is?

In Germany, all doors have handles; in the U.S. most door have round doorknobs. Handles are a lot easier to handle than knobs.

By contrast, German highway signs are unusable for foreigners (and many
Germans) since they eschew points of the compass entirely. In order to
navigate on German Autobahnen, you need to know the relative
locations of all cities in Germany. The signs won't say "B1 East" and "B1
West", but instead "B1 Richtung Bochum" and "B1 Richtung Unna" and you are
supposed to know that Unna is East of Bochum.

Worse, highway intersections in Germany use an utterly braindead
and dangerous layout where the cars that are slowing down and leaving a highway
have to share a stretch of road with those speeding up and joining
the highway. I don't think that system is in use anywhere else.

Germany is famous for orderliness and cleanliness, but
Imbissbuden (snack stands) and public toilets are often
pretty disgusting.

Some miscellaneous differences:

Everything is bigger in the US than it is in Germany: people,
meal portions, coffee cups, cars, houses, cell phones, beds, refrigerators, squirrels.

To get satellite TV in Germany, you buy
an antenna and receiver and then you can watch for free; in the
US,
you sign a contract, get antenna, receiver and decoder for free, and pay
a
monthly fee for the content (which is encoded).

To call a cell
phone in Germany, you pay a high per-minute fee and the callee
pays nothing (unless they're abroad); in the US both the caller
and the callee pay. In Germany, you can tell from the phone
number that it's a cell phone; in the U.S. cell phone numbers
look just like regular numbers, making local calls free for the caller.

In the US, you pay income taxes to the federal government
and
separately to your home state; in Germany only the federal
government
collects income taxes. Every American pays income taxes on
their world-wide income, no matter where they live or where the
money was earned (except if there are specific tax treaty provisions); in Germany you only pay income taxes on
the money earned in Germany. Americans living abroad are not
even allowed to give up citizenship to avoid paying U.S. taxes.

When you rent an apartment in the US,
the stove and fridge is normally included; in Germany you
often have to bring
your own.

In the US, credit cards have a real credit line: you can pay
back the balance at your own pace; in
Germany, credit cards suck the full balance out of your bank
account at the end of every
month. German bank accounts come with a
standard credit
line: you can simply overdraw them; this is comparatively rare in
the US.

If a German is abducted in some foreign country, German
diplomats will engage in negotiations and usually eventually pay
some money to the kidnappers. The U.S. never makes such payments, clearly the correct strategy.

Copyright in the U.S. consists simply in
the right to copy and/or modify a work. This right can be given up
or sold off. Germany's Urheberrecht in addition gives
several "moral" rights to the
creator which cannot be sold or given up, for instance the right to
receive just compensation for every copy and the right to veto any changes to
the work.

German kids are afraid of big dogs, American kids like to pet them.

In Germany you count with the fingers like this: 1-thumb, 2-index finger, 3-middle finger, 4-ring finger, 5-pinky. In the U.S., they do it like this: 1-index finger, 2-middle finger, 3-ring finger, 4-pinky, 5-thumb.

In Germnay, people wear their wedding band on the right hand, in the U.S. they wear it on the left.

When Germans buy a house, they think of it as a place where they will live for the rest of their lives; Americans will often switch houses after a couple of years.

What is called "erste Etage" in Germany is called "second
floor" in the US.

Graffiti is of higher quality and more colorful in Germany,
where it is sometimes viewed as approaching an art form; in the US it
mostly consists of simple taggings and is
almost always seen as a law enforcement problem.

Soccer is seen as a men's sport in Germany and as a women's
sport in the US.

At funeral services in Germany, the casket is closed; in the
U.S. the deceased gets make-up and clothes and the casket is open.

In Germany, if they see police, people often think something is
wrong; in the U.S., if they see police, people usually feel safe
(except for many blacks who may have had bad experiences with police before).

Making This Home is a blog by Katie, an American who lives in Germany and the US.

Ada is an American who lived from 2003 to 2005 in Germany, working as
a teaching assistant at secondary schools. In her article The Best of Both Worlds she lists the advantages of
disadvantages of the two societies from her perspective.